Inspiration
We’ve all had that night on the couch: it’s 9:30 PM, you’re holding the Fire TV remote, and you spend forty minutes flipping between Prime Video, Netflix, and Max until you’re too tired to watch anything at all.
The problem isn’t a lack of good movies or shows. The problem is that streaming menus are organized by genre and hype, when the real question on the couch is much simpler: “How am I feeling right now, and how do I want to feel when this is over?”
Sometimes your brain is fried after work and you just need a 25-minute episode to help you unwind. Other nights you want something that lifts your mood, sharpens your focus, or gives you a good cry. We built Feelies for Fire TV because the living room is where decision fatigue actually happens—and on a TV, a great recommendation only works if one press of a button actually starts the movie.
What it does
Feelies is a calm, remote-friendly Fire TV app that helps you find the right movie or single TV episode for the exact headspace you're in, then opens it directly in the streaming app you already use.
- Checks in with how you feel: Instead of scrolling through endless posters, you take ten seconds with your remote to pick what you’re looking for (Unwind, Lift, Process, Sharpen, Steady, Catharsis, or Escape), dial in your current energy, stress, and mood, and choose how much time you have.
- Recommends movies, single episodes, or a "two-step" watch: Feelies matches your state against a curated library of films and standout TV episodes. If you're feeling stuck, it can even build a two-part sequence—a short "bridge" watch that meets you where you are, followed by a feature that gently shifts your mood.
- Opens straight into Prime Video and your other apps: Because we built this for Fire TV, Prime Video is front and center. When you pick a title (even a specific episode of a show), pressing Select launches you right into Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+, Max, Hulu, Apple TV, or Criterion.
- Works right away, with or without your phone: You can pair your phone with a quick code to sync your personal taste and watch history, or just hit Explore without pairing and use the app immediately with nothing but your remote.
How we built it
We wanted Feelies on Fire TV to feel fast, warm, and genuinely built for a television across the room—not like a website squeezed onto a big screen.
We built a native Fire TV app (alongside a version for Amazon’s new Vega OS) with big, readable typography, full-screen movie art, and clear focus highlights so you never lose track of where your remote is pointing. Rather than making the TV wait on a server every time you change a slider, we packed our entire recommendation engine and film library directly into the app. As soon as you press "Find," the matching happens instantly on the Fire TV Stick itself.
Finally, we spent a lot of time mapping our library to Amazon’s catalog IDs so that when Feelies suggests a specific comfort episode or film, the handoff to Prime Video feels seamless.
Challenges we ran into
- Designing for a remote, not a touchscreen: On a phone or laptop, you can tap anywhere. On a TV, every move is Up, Down, Left, Right, Select, or Back. Early on, we found places where pressing the Back button on the remote accidentally closed the whole app instead of just closing a menu. We had to rethink every screen so the remote always behaves the way your thumb expects it to.
- Supporting older Fire TV Sticks alongside brand-new ones: Millions of living rooms still use older Fire TV Sticks, while newer setups run the latest Fire OS or Amazon's new Vega OS. Getting one tiny, fast app to run smoothly across seven years of hardware—without crashing or feeling sluggish—took a lot of careful trimming under the hood.
- Getting episode links to actually open the right episode: At first, our Prime Video links worked for movies, but TV episodes kept failing to link directly. We realized Amazon uses a completely different, case-sensitive ID format for individual episodes than it does for movies. Once we fixed how we looked up those IDs, nearly 200 Prime Video episodes went from generic searches to one-click launches.
- Letting people try the app without forcing a sign-up wall: Originally, the TV app started with a mandatory phone-pairing screen, and we used a hidden developer shortcut to skip it while testing. We realized that if we didn't want to grab our phones every time we tested the app, real users wouldn't want to either. That pushed us to turn "Explore without pairing" into a real feature on the welcome screen.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- It feels like a real living-room app: You can sit ten feet away, click through your mood in a few seconds, and be watching a movie on Prime Video in under a minute.
- Tiny, fast, and instant: We shrunk the entire Fire TV app down to just 2 megabytes—smaller than a single smartphone photo—while still bundling the full recommendation engine right inside it.
- Single-episode magic: Recommending one specific 28-minute episode of a series when someone only has half an hour before bed—and having the Fire TV jump straight to it—is one of our favorite moments in the app.
- Consistent recommendations everywhere: Whether you use Feelies on your phone, the web, or your Fire TV, the app speaks the same language and gives you the same thoughtful picks.
What we learned
- The TV is an emotional space, not a browsing space: When people turn on the TV at night, they usually don't want to "search" or read long reviews. Giving people a smaller, calmer shelf of five great picks beats showing them five hundred options every time.
- Test the exact version you plan to ship: Several bugs we caught—like missing data in compressed builds or subtle remote-navigation hiccups—only showed up when we tested the final, packaged TV app rather than our developer preview.
- The handoff is half the product: A recommendation app is only as good as its last step. Putting Prime Video first on Fire TV and sweating the details of how one app opens another made the whole experience feel cohesive.
What's next for Feelies Fire TV
- "Watch Together" for the couch: Often it’s not just one person watching. Next, we want to let two people on the couch each check in with how they’re feeling—say, one person is stressed and exhausted, and the other wants a laugh—and find the sweet-spot movie that works for both of them.
- Learning your household’s rhythm: Adding a quick, one-click check-in the next time you open the app ("Did that hit the spot?") so your Fire TV gradually learns what actually helps your household unwind or recharge.
- Bringing Feelies to the Amazon Appstore: Finishing our testing across physical Fire TV Sticks and Cubes and rolling out our Vega OS build so anyone can download Feelies straight from their Fire TV home screen.
Built With
- brightscript
- fire-os-/-android-tv
- gradle-kotlin-dsl
- health-connect
- healthkit
- jetpack-compose-for-tv
- justwatch-api
- next.js-(app-router)
- react
- react-native-(kepler)
- resend
- tailwind-css
- tmdb-api
- typescript
- upstash-redis
- vega
- vercel
- vercel-ai-sdk
- vercel-blob
- youtube-data-api
