James R | On 27, Nov 2017

UKTV has become the first broadcaster in the UK with voice-activated universal search on Amazon Fire TV.

Viewers can now search for shows from UKTV by speaking into their Amazon Fire TV Stick, and once they’ve found what they’re looking for, they’ll be taken directly to the UKTV Play app to watch their selected programme. 
 
The UKTV Play app was developed in-house by the UKTV Play digital products team and is home to catch-up and on-demand shows from UKTV channels Dave, Yesterday, Really and Drama. The new search functionality on Amazon Fire TV reduces time spent finding shows. 
 
Since launching UKTV Play on Amazon Fire TV in 2015, views on the service have increased significantly every year. With popular shows such as Emmy and Broadcast nominated Taskmaster available on demand, views are up 322 per cent year-on-year on Fire TV.
 
It was a two-stage process to integrate the UKTV Play app with the Amazon Fire TV universal search functionality. The UKTV digital products team worked with Amazon to integrate a feed of UKTV’s free catalogue of shows which is updated every 24 hours to ensure that images, episode titles and descriptions for shows are current.   
 
Once this work was completed, the UKTV Play app – available to download from the Amazon Appstore on Fire TV – was subsequently updated to work with the search. 
 
The integration is now live and programmes on UKTV Play this month include Dara O Briain’s Go 8 Bit, Dave Gorman Modern Life is Goodish and The White Princess, starring Jodie Comer and Suki Waterhouse. Red Dwarf boxsets are also available.
 

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