Amazon is renaming its free ad-supported streaming service from IMDb TV to Amazon Freevee. The service originally launched in the US in early 2019 as IMDb Freedive before being renamed IMDb TV a few months later. Over the last two years, it has tripled in monthly active viewers and expanded to the UK late last year. Amazon says the service will expand to Germany later this year and increase its catalog of original shows and movies by 70% in 2022.
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Yikes. I hope this comes across a lot better in other languages, because in English, for me anyway, this is a loser.
First, a person needs to take a class in remedial Amazon Fire TV, and then enroll in Amazon Fire TV continuing education classes almost weekly. Ridiculous. It wearies us. It’s all way too much, even if a customer ia inspired by cord-cutting. We long for the days of just turning on the TV and changing channels, or “turning the dial”, or finding programming without speaking to an inanimate device (only after pushing the right buttons), or entering letters/numbers via the Search Function, or struggling to locate local TV programming (not on Amazon) via Antenna through Source Selections. By the time you’ve marched through all of the Amazon paces, unless you get an early start prior to viewing, you may miss much of what you might want to view. Tech can be great, but some of it is just absolute overkill when it could be so much simpler. And what is really an insult is the popup that asks, “Who’s watching?” Amazon is inspiring us to go cold turkey on TV, and just turn on the radio–and not SiriusXM radio.
That is dumb
Maybe it’s dumb enough to be memorable……
I agree that it’s a goofy name. If Amazon is trying to get customers to understand what the service is, perhaps they should have just called it “Kinda-Like-PlutoTV”. That’s. pretty clear.
Awful name.
Yeesh, this sounds kind of suggestive.
I once knew a girl…
Ok, back on track…
Rebrands are NEVER good news. A lot of marketing expense mixed with wasted time and effort, and NOBODY is fooled or CARES. Maybe Amazon is looking to dump IMDB by trying to entice potential buyers.
Strange. IMDB is at least recognizable. This name is not the best.
Name chosen by a 16 year old.
Can’t tolerate the commercials.
Looking forward to Bosch: Legacy on Freezer.
Eh, not stellar, but not bad. There’s a rule in branding that two to three syllables is better than more, and better still if the brand name is easily said by speakers of multiple languages and age groups. IMdb TV is just a hodgepodge of letters, honestly. FreeVee sounds silly, but silly can work well.
But branding was only a tiny problem. The app itself needs work. A watchlist would be nice. There should be a Live TV section not mixed in with On Demand stuff(which should be in a separate section). The fire tablet version of the app could benefit from having the channel layout for Live TV instead of the current tiled layout, and actually have them well…live. Basically mimic the Pluto TV layout as close as they can without raising the specter of a litigation.
The name sounds like a downmarket copy of Freeview. And only out by a couple of letters too…
I did notice a change in the UI of the IMDb TV player on the Fire TV device recently. Perhaps getting ready for the Freevee rebrand later in the month?
@Elias,
I did notice a HOME PAGE UI change on one of my FTV4K Max devices today. It receive an update and after a restart the HOME, FIND and LIVE tabs that were spelled out on the Home Page are now replaced with icons for FIND, HOME, LIVE and MY STUFF. I checked the Fire OS and Fire TV Home Versions on all devices and they are the same, but only one has updated with the change. Guess it is something at a system component level that has been update.
freevee –
agree it’s a silly name.
pro: lots of good shows available
con: if you finish a season of a show, it autoplays next random show. Need option not to do this. Anybody else have this issue?
con: ADS are too long and always the same ads. At first glance, very minimal ads. Then after getting invested in an episode or show, ads go from short and tolerable to long and repetetive.
Anybody know how to turn off freevee autoplay annoyance (probably a feature for Amazon LOL)?
Is it possible to block ads on FireTV devices? I miss the early FireTV boxes. Less fluff, less ads, more free content without having to hunt for it.