CBS has released an all-new CBS News app for the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. The new app is not an update to the old app, but rather, a replacement. This means that, if you have the old app installed on your device, it may never be updated to the new app. You will need to manually install the new app. You can actually have both versions of the CBS News apps on the same device if you wish, but the old one has been removed from the Fire TV appstore, so once you uninstall the old app, you will not be able reinstall it. A completely free live 24/7 news stream is still present and the star feature of the app, but it has received a visual refresh and a few nice new features.

The CBS News app now has a vertical scrolling main menu which replaces the previous horizontal tab interface. Instead of having Shows and Topics separated into different areas of the app, they now live together in the main vertical menu on the left side of the app.

One of the really nice new features is the way the live news stream shrinks into a small window in the upper left corner of the app while you navigate the various on-demand videos. This allows you to browse for videos that may interest you more than what is currently airing live, without having to close the stream. It’s a nice picture-in-picture effect that I wish other apps, or even the main Fire TV interface, would adopt.

The app also now allows you to mark videos as favorites, which get stored away in dedicated section for easy retrieval. Overall, this is a very nice upgrade to, what I think is, the best source of completely free 24/7 live news on Fire TV devices.