Amazon expanded its Prime Video Clips feature on May 8, 2026, broadening a short-form video feed that first appeared on the platform during the 2025-26 NBA season into a general entertainment discovery tool covering movies and series from across the Prime Video catalog. The move is the latest step in a sustained effort to rebuild the mobile experience around vertical, phone-first interactions rather than the traditional horizontal browse grid.

What Clips is and where it came from

Clips is a scrollable, full-screen vertical video feed. According to Amazon's announcement, it "transforms the best moments from Prime Video into quick hits of entertainment." The feed surfaces short segments drawn from titles available on the platform, personalized to each user's viewing history so that every session generates a different set of recommendations.

The feature did not start with movies. According to the announcement, Clips first launched with NBA highlights on the NBA collection page during the 2025-26 season - the first year of Amazon's landmark 11-year, approximately $1.8 billion-per-year broadcasting deal with the NBA. That original deployment was a narrow, sports-focused surface. The May 8 expansion is the first time Clips has been made available across the full Prime Video library.

The practical mechanics are straightforward. On the Prime Video mobile home page, a Clips carousel appears below the fold. Tapping any clip launches a full-screen vertical player. From there, users can swipe through additional clips, watch the complete underlying title, rent or buy it, subscribe to access it through a channel add-on, save it to a watchlist, or "like" the clip. Sharing is also built in: tapping the share button produces a link that can be sent through messaging apps, social platforms, or email. The recipient needs the Prime Video app installed on a mobile device to open the shared clip.

The personalization layer

The content surfaced in Clips is not random. According to the announcement, snippets are "tailored to their interests" based on viewing history. Each new session produces fresh material. That personalization mechanism relies on the same underlying data infrastructure Amazon has been building across its streaming and advertising platforms - the same signals that power content recommendations throughout Prime Video and that, in a different form, feed into Prime Video viewership data available to advertisers through Amazon Marketing Cloud.

The distinction from passive autoplay is notable. Rather than simply running a trailer when a user lands on a title page, Clips places the user in an active browsing mode where short content extracts replace text-and-image cards as the primary discovery interface. The format is explicitly modeled on vertical short-form video consumption patterns that have become standard on mobile devices across other social and video platforms.

Mobile as a strategic surface

The Clips expansion is part of a broader set of changes Amazon has been making to the Prime Video mobile experience. According to the announcement, three other updates have recently shipped alongside Clips: a refreshed home page that auto-plays trailers as users browse, vertical images designed for phone screens that allow users to see up to 50% more titles on screen, and a redesigned player that makes it easier to explore cast details, trivia, and new titles without exiting the current viewing session.

Together, these changes represent a fairly complete redesign of how Prime Video presents itself on a smartphone. The vertical image format alone - showing 50% more titles within the same screen real estate - is a meaningful change to the information density of the browse experience. The auto-playing trailer home page adds motion to what was previously a static grid. And the redesigned player addresses the friction of mid-session browsing, which previously required exiting content entirely.

Brian Griffin, director of global application experiences at Prime Video, explained the rationale in the announcement: "As a first-stop entertainment destination, Prime Video offers customers a vast selection of premium content, and we want to make it as easy and seamless as possible for them to discover what's most relevant. Clips gives customers a whole new way to browse with short, personalized snippets tailored to their interests. Whether they have a few minutes to scroll or are looking for something to watch when they have more time, entertainment is just a tap away."

Availability and rollout

The rollout is staged. According to the announcement, Clips is initially reaching select customers in the United States on iOS, Android, and Fire tablets. Full availability across those same three device types is expected by summer 2026. No international rollout timeline has been disclosed.

The United States-first, phased approach is consistent with how Amazon has handled other Prime Video feature launches. AI-powered Video Recaps, which launched in beta on November 19, 2025, also began with select customers on specific device types before broader availability. The scene search feature on Fire TV launched in early December 2025 under the same kind of staged model.

Fire tablets appear alongside iOS and Android specifically, which is worth noting. Amazon's own hardware ecosystem gives it a direct distribution channel for new features without app store intermediaries. Fire tablet inclusion ensures the feature reaches a segment of users who may be deeper in the Amazon ecosystem and more likely to hold Prime memberships.

What is on Prime Video

Prime Video's catalog, which Clips now draws from, covers a substantial range of content. According to the announcement, this includes Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies, licensed titles, and programming from add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, HBO Max, Crunchyroll, and MGM+. The platform also carries more than 900 free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels.

Prime membership, which includes Prime Video access, costs $14.99 per month or $139 per year in the United States. An ad-free tier - now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra since April 10, 2026, at $4.99 per month following a 67% price increase from the previous $2.99 Ad Free subscription - gives viewers the option to watch without advertisements.

Context within Amazon's advertising business

The Clips expansion sits inside a much larger commercial picture. Prime Video's ad-supported audience reached 315 million viewers globally as of Amazon's Q4 2025 earnings disclosure, up from 200 million as of April 2024. Amazon's advertising services segment generated $21.3 billion in Q4 2025 alone, representing 23% year-over-year growth, and the full-year 2025 advertising total reached $68.6 billion. By Q1 2026, Amazon's advertising business crossed $70 billion on a trailing twelve-month basis, with advertising services revenue of $17.2 billion in that quarter growing 24% year-over-year.

That revenue context matters for understanding why the mobile discovery experience is a strategic priority. The more time a viewer spends in the Prime Video app - browsing, watching clips, completing viewing sessions - the more inventory Amazon can serve, and the more behavioral data it collects to improve ad targeting. A Clips session that ends with a full episode viewed is also a session that has demonstrated content preference signals that can inform both content recommendations and ad placement decisions.

The engagement model Clips encourages is close to the consumption pattern advertisers pay a premium to reach. Short-form browsing on mobile produces high-intent engagement signals. Users who tap through multiple clips before settling on a full title have, in effect, declared preferences for genre, tone, and content type in a way that passive home page browsing does not. That behavioral data feeds into Amazon's first-party data stack, which already powers zip code-level ad targeting for Prime Video and viewership-based audience segmentation in Amazon Marketing Cloud.

The broader competitive landscape

The vertical short-form browsing format Clips employs is not new. It is the dominant interaction model on several major mobile video and social platforms. What is different about the Prime Video implementation is its position inside a subscription streaming service rather than a social network or pure short-form platform. Clips is not a standalone product. It is a discovery layer placed within an existing app, with the explicit goal of reducing the distance between browsing and viewing.

That placement has implications for how it might be used in advertising. Amazon has previously introduced interactive ad formats for Prime Video - including interactive betting integration for NBA coverage and location-based ads - and the Clips feed represents a new environment that could eventually carry sponsored content alongside organic clips. No advertising integration for Clips has been announced, but the structural parallel with sponsored content formats on other short-form platforms is evident.

For marketing professionals, the key variable is engagement depth. Research published in April 2026 found that 76% of US streaming subscribers believe platforms carry too many ads, and only 24% pay attention during ad breaks. A discovery feature that increases voluntary, active engagement with the platform before a viewing session begins is, from an advertiser's perspective, a different kind of inventory than a pre-roll or mid-roll served during passive viewing. The attention state of a user actively scrolling for something to watch is more valuable than the attention state of a user waiting for an ad to finish.

Amazon's May 2026 content lineup on Prime Video includes the premiere of Spider-Noir on May 27, ongoing live sports across five leagues, and several Amazon Music livestream events - all content that would appear in the Clips feed as Clips expands to cover movies and series broadly.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon's Prime Video division, with Brian Griffin, director of global application experiences at Prime Video, named as the executive behind the initiative.

What: Prime Video expanded its Clips feature - a scrollable, full-screen vertical video feed - from NBA highlights to movies and series across the entire Prime Video catalog. The expansion is part of a broader set of mobile experience improvements including a redesigned home page with auto-playing trailers, vertical imagery showing up to 50% more titles, and a rebuilt in-app player. Clips surfaces short, personalized content segments based on viewing history, and allows users to watch full titles, save to watchlists, share clips, rent or buy content, or subscribe through add-on channels directly from within the feed.

When: Amazon announced the expansion on May 8, 2026. The feature is currently rolling out to select US customers, with full availability on iOS, Android, and Fire tablets expected by summer 2026. The original Clips feature launched earlier in the 2025-26 NBA season, which began October 24, 2025.

Where: The United States only, on iOS, Android, and Fire tablet devices. No international timeline has been announced.

Why: The Clips expansion is Amazon's effort to reduce discovery friction on mobile by replacing static browse grids with active, personalized short-form video. The format encourages deeper engagement before a viewing session begins, generating behavioral signals that inform both content recommendations and Prime Video's advertising targeting infrastructure - a platform that reached 315 million global ad-supported viewers as of Q4 2025 and sits inside an advertising business generating more than $70 billion annually on a trailing twelve-month basis.

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