How to Change Stream and Download Quality for Amazon Prime Video

Amazon, the largest e-commerce corporation in the world, offers a premium member service called Amazon Prime. If you subscribe to the Amazon Prime service then you get many benefits like the speedy delivery of the products you purchase from Amazon and access to Amazon Prime Video which is the online on-demand video streaming service from Amazon. You can watch TV shows, movies, documentaries along with the special programs specially made for Amazon. Prime Video app is available for Android or iPhone, but you can also use any web browser on your desktop computer to watch the TV shows or movies on Prime Video.

When using the Prime Video app on your smartphone, you have the choice to watch the video stream online or download it to your device for watching later. In both the cases, you can choose the quality of the video that can be streamed or downloaded to your device. Here is how:

  1. Launch the Prime Video app in your smartphone.
  2. Tap on the menu icon and select Settings from the menu.Amazon Prime Video Quality
  3. On the Amazon Video Settings screen tap on Stream & Download option.
  4. On the Stream & Download screen, you can tap on Streaming Quality and Download Quality to change the respective video qualities.Amazon Prime Video Quality
  5. You can choose the video quality from data saver, good, better, best or the highest quality possible.

If you choose the highest quality, you should make sure that you have a really fast internet connection. An internet connection of around 8 Mbps minimum will be good enough for watching these movies without having to sit down and waste your time staring at that spinning circle that shows that video is buffering. If the movie is buffering a lot, perhaps you can choose to download it and watch it later when it has finally finished downloading completely.

14 comments

  1. I have prime video on my Uhd 4k tv,and I tried changing the audio language of a movie to French,so I did it on the settings,clicked French,went back to my movie,it was in CHINESE!!! Lolll…I tried all other languages,they were all the right languages but French was NOT French! Can I do something about that?

  2. Unfortunately, when I open the Amazon Prime Videos app on my Samsung Tab S5e there is no settings nor hamburger icon.

    1. I had the same problem, after a lot of attempts I clicked on the My Stuff I on on the lower left of the Home page in the Prime app. You should see the little hamburger/gear thing on the upper right. That should get you to the correct menu.

  3. I watched 10 minutes of the City v Burnley game then had to switch off!!! It was like watching a game from the sixties. Picture absolutely dreadful. Watching this on my Panasonic flat screen. Is this going to improve?

  4. My wireless data usage has jumped from 300GB per month to 1,000Gb in Feb, just 28 days. Nothing has changed. No one is using my wireless connection. No games no downloads of any consequence. No guests. I stream Amazon and Xfinity several hours a day. I always close apps when not in use. Now I am actually turning off the wireless and shutting down devices in order not to gobble up my data and cost me.
    I use a Mac Book Pro up to a couple of hours a day. I disconnected my Airport and started using their Xfinity’s Gateway in order to install the Xfi app to determine the usage on each device. The app shows my Amazon Fire HD 10″ is using unbelievable amounts of data. 63GB in one day when I only streamed for a few hours at Best Quality, 1.82G an hour. That’s almost 35 hours! Physically impossible. I don’t see how it can be the fault of the tablet because I have 2 identical Amazon Fire HD 10″. I just switched the streaming quality to “Better”, 1 hr uses about 0.77 GB of data. The quality is actually quite good. But I sure would like to figure out what is wrong since I have been w/Xfinity 23 years with many, many months of 300GB usage. Any ideas? Your input is appreciated.

    1. Amazon Fire HD has a feature called “On Deck”. It pre-downloads the videos/movies in anticipation that you might want to watch them based on your history. Disable this feature in Amazon Fire settings and you will be all set .

  5. I have the correct firmware on my TV there isn’t any option to change the settings lower? My wife has watched about 13 hours of TV and used nearly 100gb of our allowance how the hell do we turn it down

  6. I did an experiment. I changed the streaming setting on my iPhone from good to best and closed Settings. Then I asked my husband to check the settings on his iPhone. His streaming was still set to good. To me that means the settings are stored separately on each device and only control that device. So what are the streaming settings for the TV and how can you adjust them, since it doesn’t appear possible when accessing settings on the TV?

    1. Yes, the settings are device specific. I talked to Amazon Prime support and they told me that if quality settings don’t appear then you have to update the firmware software on your TV.

  7. Ty! I think there are just some videos that aren’t fixable. Some are clear, others are just tons of pixels. Pretty annoying.

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