Apple TV’s InSight feature is ready to take on Amazon Prime Video’s X-Ray

We also have the developer beta for the newest version of tvOS – the software running Apple TV hardware – and, with that, our first glimpse of a major new feature. Called InSight, it’s similar to the X-Ray feature already found on Amazon Prime Video, offering upquick bites of information about who is in a scene and what music might be playing.

Beyond interface amenities such as fonts and background colour scheme – InSight looks and feels newsmagaziny like Apple, and X-Ray feels like it returns Prime Video to the less-sleek realm – they pretty much work the same. If you hit pause on a movie or show, or depress the screen (the press down takes you straight to the info), you get thumbnails with both the real name (or the stage name; we presume for those who perform under a pseudonym) and the character’s name. Click on one of the thumbnails, and the info has more about the actor, with taps/links taking you to other films and shows they appear in, and in other capacities. For Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein, there are thumbnails for movies and series, and he also has a producing tile and a writing tile.

And here again, Apple is very clever with this. Even though all the related thumbnails for movies and TV series are presented in the same look, it’s where they take you that depends upon where the content in question is available. It might indeed be something that is available on Apple TV+. Or it could be something on Amazon Prime Video or Hulu or Plex – or a piece of content being served up by any other platform that Apple has deemed to get along with TV+ (presumably, that means no related content that is available only on Netflix, which is a holdout).

InSight also takes you to a song playing on screen. If you click deep enough, you won’t have the song open automatically – it does add the song to an Apple Music playlist called ‘Saved Songs’, though. Nice touch.

It’s available now only on the tvOS 18 developer beta, so people who aren’t on the bleeding edge will have to wait until the TV app reaches Apple’s TV hardware before the InSight feature shows up. And of course, things can change before then. Then again, too.

But so far, so good.