Amazon is quietly trying to make Prime Video the place you flip to first — not just for the latest streaming drama or a Sunday night game, but for the day’s headlines. This week, the company rolled out a dedicated news destination on the Prime Video homepage in the U.S., a 24/7 front door that stitches together national networks, local stations, business feeds and thematic channels so viewers can move from “what to watch” straight into live news without having to hunt through apps or inputs. The feature is positioned like any other row on the service — think movies, series, sports — but its content is live and continuous, from breaking headlines to markets, weather and talk shows.

Amazon didn’t try to build credibility by stealth. At launch, the news destination includes familiar names: ABC News Live, CBS News 24/7, LiveNOW from Fox, CNN Headlines and NBC News NOW, alongside a slate of local, regional and specialty outlets. The point is obvious: make news feel native to Prime Video, not an afterthought shoehorned into an app that already feels like a hub for everything you watch. For viewers, that means one interface, one remote or one app on their phone, and a long list of live feeds arranged by topic rather than by which company made the app.

There’s a strategic simplicity to the move. Amazon says the destination is free for all customers in the U.S. — not gated behind Prime membership — and it’s being rolled into the top navigation on thousands of devices, with a promise that every U.S. customer will see it by the end of the year. Free access, bolstered by ads, lowers the friction for someone who just wants to turn on the TV and catch up; it’s the same logic behind the broader expansion of free, ad-supported streaming and the “FAST” (free ad-supported television) ecosystem. That baseline, Amazon hopes, will pull viewers into the Prime Video environment where they’ll also be offered premium add-ons and subscriptions.

The scale Amazon is pitching is worth pausing on: the news destination will coexist with more than 800 free ad-supported channels already available on Prime Video, and the company says its news offering will grow to more than 200 channels by year’s end. That’s a deliberate pivot deeper into the FAST playbook — building a cable-like grid of live streams and topical channels but without a cable bill and with Amazon’s ad infrastructure glueing it together. For cord-cutters, that means a familiar channel roster; for advertisers, it means a more granular way to reach audiences across both national and local news programming inside a single app.

To understand why Amazon is doubling down on this model, look at the broader product moves of the last 18 months. Prime Video already shifted toward an advertising-first architecture in many markets, and Amazon has been consolidating its free streaming footprint — most notably by folding Freevee’s catalog into Prime Video and phasing out the Freevee brand. That consolidation simplified the product family and made Prime Video the canonical place for both paid and free, ad-supported content on Amazon’s platforms. The result is a single destination that can sell both national advertiser buys and local placements that would previously have been spread across multiple apps.

Practically, what you’ll see on screen is less revolutionary than convenient: a news row on the home screen, a grid of live tiles, and the ability to jump between a “headline” feed, local stations and specialized channels — business, weather, Spanish-language, sports and more — without leaving Prime Video. But tucked behind that simplicity are some of Amazon’s more experimental features: the same AI that powers Prime Insights for sports and the company’s X-Ray metadata tools for shows are part of the same platform logic, and Amazon is increasingly comfortable layering commerce (Shop the Show) and AI-driven overlays into live experiences. Stitching news into that environment expands the moments where Amazon can surface shopping, subscriptions or other monetizable actions.

There’s a tension baked into the idea, though. News — particularly local news — is a different beast from scripted streaming series. Local stations depend on distribution with high reach and trustworthy presentation; audiences expect a clear editorial identity. Aggregating dozens of local feeds inside a single navigation panel risks flattening those identities into “tiles,” and journalists and newsrooms will be watching to see whether their reporting gets discoverable placement or is relegated to the long tail. For viewers, the tradeoff is convenience against curation: you lose the friction of switching apps, but you also rely on Amazon’s interface and algorithms to highlight what’s important.

For advertisers and networks, the upside is measurable. Amazon’s ad business has been on an aggressive expansion path, and Prime Video’s ad footprint has grown substantially as the platform embraced ad-supported tiers and FAST channels. The consolidation of Freevee and the growing ad reach across Prime Video make the platform more attractive to national and local advertisers who want both scale and the targeting data Amazon can bring to bear. That combination helps explain why Amazon would surface news — a high-frequency, appointment-style content category — directly on its home page.

What this means for everyday viewers is, for now, straightforward: if you live in the U.S., you’ll start seeing a “News” entry on Prime Video’s top navigation. Click it and you’ll find live national streams, local stations where available, and a lineup of specialty feeds that aim to cover markets and topics in one place. It’s free, ad-supported and designed to be that default “turn on the TV” experience — a small but not insignificant nudge toward making Prime Video the first screen people open when they sit down to watch. If the experiment succeeds, Amazon will have one more lever to keep viewers inside its ecosystem — and one more place to sell ads, subscriptions and shoppable experiences while they watch.

There are open questions: will networks get the prominence they need inside Amazon’s UI, and will local stations be fairly compensated and discoverable? How will Amazon balance editorial independence with a platform that also runs commerce and advertising at scale? For readers and viewers, the immediate takeaway is simpler: Prime Video just became a bigger one-stop shop for live TV, and news now sits alongside your movies, shows and sports in the same scrolling world of tiles — convenient, ad-backed, and very much part of Amazon’s strategy to be the place you go first when you want to watch something.