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I watch a lot of Prime Video. Whether it’s from their own catalog of Prime Originals like The Boys, Fallout, or (one of my favorites) The Legend of Vox Machina, or tucking in to its huge library of movies, there’s a lot to choose from.

But, because there’s a lot to sift through, browsing it all on Prime Video also defaults to a setting that drives me absolutely insane—autoplay previews. Luckily, there’s an easy way to disable it that I’m going to show you to give you back some sanity.

What are autoplay previews?

If you’re a user of Amazon Prime Video, you’re undoubtedly familiar with its user interface, which presents its offerings of movies and TV shows in graphical tiles or cards that are organized by various categories and groupings you can scroll through. At the very top is a larger carousel of featured content, too.

By default, whether on the Prime Video app on streaming devices, smart TVs, or on the web, when you select or hover over one of these tiles—say to read the information on it—after a couple of seconds, it triggers a trailer or short clip from the title, with sound, automatically.

As you navigate the catalog—and let’s face it, there’s a lot of scrolling and stopping going on—every time you pause, a new trailer is triggered. And while it may not necessarily be as bothersome if you browse and do most of your Prime Video watching on a computer through a web browser, but if you’re like me and have a large-screen projector or TV with a decent audio system in your living room, every newly-triggered trailer can be a loud and jarring experience that I find supremely annoying.

Maybe some folks like getting a little video snippet of the title, but not me. There’s a ton of content to work through to find something good to watch, and while I pause to read the short synopsis and read its details, before I get halfway through, I’m assaulted by an annoying trailer. It has the aesthetic of old-school channel-flipping I grew up with, with short bursts of sound and snippets, and all I want to do is scroll past it or mute my audio to cope.

Luckily, turning this default feature off is simple, and once you do it, you won’t look back.

It should be noted that autoplay previews is not to be confused with the next-episode autoplay, which automatically advances and plays the next episode after the one you’ve just watched. This can be turned off, too, by the way.

How to turn off Prime Video autoplay previews

Thankfully, Prime Video’s autoplay previews do not happen on mobile or tablet apps, so if that’s your primary viewing platform, then you can move along. If you’re a user of a streaming device such as an Apple TV, Fire TV Stick, or Roku, or use the Prime Video app installed right on your smart TV, then these steps will likely be all the same or very similar.

However, the easiest way to turn off Prime Video autoplay previews is through a web browser. Here’s how.

On your web browser:

1. Go to primevideo.com.
2. Hover over the profile icon at the top right of the page, and make sure you’ve selected the profile you want to adjust.
3. From the dropdown menu, select “Account & Settings.”
4. Sign in with your username and password.
5. Click the “Player” tab.
6. This is the important part—click “Off” in the “Autoplay video and live events” section. This will stop trailers and live event trailers from playing automatically.
7. Refresh the browser and you’re done.
8. Repeat for any other profiles in your family that want autoplay previews turned off, too.

Making this change here will apply to your other devices that you use Prime Video through, although some users have complained that this isn’t the case. If it hasn’t synced across devices, I’m going to outline the steps for turning autoplay previews off on a streaming device.

On your streaming device:

1. On the Prime Video app (Apple TV in the example), use the remote to scroll over to expose the menu list.
2. Select “Settings.”
3. Scroll down to “Autoplay.”
4. Scroll right to highlight the “Autoplay” selection.
5. Click it so it says “Off.”
6. Return to the main menu and bask in the calm of no autoplay previews.

A couple more Prime Video tips to think about

If you’ve recently started using Prime Video and were as annoyed as I was by autoplay previews, then I hope disabling it improves your viewing experience as greatly as it has mine. Here are a few other easy things I’d suggest as well.

• **Create separate profiles to fine-tune your recommendations: **It’s not a new feature by any means, but if you haven’t created additional profiles for your family members or roommates, you should. It will keep your recommendations separate, so what Prime Video serves up to you will be more tailored to your viewing habits.
• Keep your Watchlist neat and tidy: If you haven’t started using the Prime Video Watchlist feature, you should. It’s not only a great place to tuck away shows and movies you like for later viewing or reminders, but it also helps train your recommendations, too. However, the Watchlist can get unruly over time if you don’t regularly maintain it. We have a full explainer on how to manage your Prime Video Watchlist in case it’s already too late.

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With a few small tweaks, browsing Prime Video can be a much more enjoyable experience. It has one of the biggest and best libraries of any streaming service, but sometimes its user experience is enough to make you go see what’s on Netflix.

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