Amazon's Fire TV is Adding Full-Screen Video Ads That Play When You Start Your Fire TV

Every day, the reasons to either switch to dumb devices or open-source software keep piling up.

Then you have the mainstream user that can't be bothered to even install an adblocker. It is mind-boggling.
- You underestimate how scary it is for them to do anything out or the ordinary. Most "normal people" and I include people like project managers in a tech company, really think things will blow up if they mess with any settings.
  
  This is why the default browser setting is so valuable.
- The mainstream user doesn't care enough to install an adblocker

Amazon is adding full-screen video ads that will play when you start your Fire TV unless you quickly perform an action on it. […] “Our focus is on delivering an immersive experience so customers can enjoy their favorite TV shows and movies, as well as browse and discover more content they’ll want to watch. We’re always working to make the Fire TV experience better for customers and have updated one of the prominent placements in the UI to play a short content preview if no other action is taken by a customer upon turning on their Fire TV.” Amazon said in a statement to Cord Cutters News.

Sure, that’s definitely a feature for customers. Especially the fact that you can only click it away in the first few seconds. I also love to have my ads be immersive. Biggest pile of bullshit I’ve heard this week.

Sure, that’s definitely a feature for customers.

You misunderstand: the advertisers are the customers.

A lot of the fire tvs can be rooted! There’s a great community over at XDA with all the needed resources.

I have two 4k sticks (1st gen) rooted and debloated running Leanback launcher. When you cut out all the junk, it really is (or was?) the best 4k streaming device under $50.

I‘ll definitely have to try if that’s possible with my Grundig TV that has a FireTV built in.
- Coolcool! At the very least, you should be able to block Amazon from pushing updates.

People keep buying big tech products and subscriptions then are shocked when they fuck you over? shocked picachu

Unfortunately, for a lot of non-tech savy people, the options often boil down to this kind of shit or being part of a botnet within a few days.
- Yeah, what is the alternative? “Oh you can assemble your own raspberry pi kit, after you partition an SD card and install a special version of Linux you can then tunnel it to a vpn and BitTorrent all your movies and shows using the -arr software suite and then use a package manager to install Kodi or jellyfin to watch, and maybe if you put docker on it you can use HomeAssistant to dim your lights when watching”
  
  Meanwhile their iPhone autocorrects half those words to something else.
There are fewer and fewer options every day that aren't by big brands.
- It’s a real shame. Monopolies in any industry/product inevitably lead to fucking over consumers… time we broke em up I think
Have you tried shopping for a non-smart TV lately?

I may be an anomalous IT professional, but despite being a coder and generally a ginormous nerd, I've never really understood why people buy "smart" devices. This isn't a criticism; I honestly just don't understand why they're popular. The amount of convenience they provide really doesn't seem like it's worth it at all, to me

Being poor makes you make different decisions than when you can afford any option you like. We wanted a big 4k TV and it was the best option for our wallets.
Well what do you use to watch TV?
- An old hand-me-down 1080p TV and my laptop
I feel like there’s a misunderstanding here that keeps coming up. The Amazon fire TV isn’t a smart TV, it’s a streaming device (usb stick style) that you plug into your TV. And it’s quite understandable why people want to stream videos on their TV, that’s how they access Netflix, Disney plus etc.

Edit: it’s apparently a TV as well.
- No, the Fire TV Stick is a streaming stick. The Fire TV is a TV with the stick built in and it makes you go through the Amazon Fire UI to do normal TV things as well.
- They have TV's as well as the Fire Sticks, and people buy them because they are cheap. I have Roku TV, but it never gets on the network, I just use Apple TV.
- I guess those devices make more sense if you don't have a laptop. I only have a laptop (well, that and a Steam Deck which counts as mobile Linux I guess) so I just plonk it into the HDMI port
I have a few roku boxes and a Google TV Chromecast. The Samsung TV I bought is a smart TV and it's slow as crap. I ended up putting a Roku box on it and use it that way. Now when the TV starts I have to hurry up and hit a button on the Roku remote to wake it up otherwise the TV starts auto playing a random channel from their new TV app that you can't seem to uninstall. I'm really just waiting for the tv to die so I can go find a new TV that isn't smart. The problem is those seem to be more expensive now.

I like the Google TV Chromecast because it aggregates all the services you sign into and can start showing me things I like and may want to watch next, right from the home screen.

But you are right, the tv itself being the smart device just isn't worth it for me. I'd rather have a dongle or box I can swap out if it starts going south. I have a Plex server and I need something in order to play that on the TV unless I just start getting a casting device and just cast from a phone.
- Can't you just disconnect the TV from the internet to prevent it playing channels?
for tv stuff "smart" is the only thing that exists now

You can btw "simply" opt out from this in the settings (look for "featured content" and disable it).

Yes it should be opt-in, but it's not that hard to keep the fire tv (stick) being a good device for the price paid.

You can ...

For now. Until everyone gets used to it and suddenly the option to opt out disappears.
- I can still throw away my fire tv stick then. At the moment it still does the job I bought it for and I won't produce unnecessary garbage for something that might happen in the future.

"Smart" devices are not smart for us, they are devices the manufacturers get to control

please tell me i can do something with ADB against that. my boyfriend is already annoyed at those, and i want to do something against it. no root sadly.

I wish, I have not found a way yet and I work in cybersecurity. Though I have to admit I didn't give it my best at all.

One thing I would like to try soon is running FLauncher. Though I kinda doubt they will allow another launcher to be set as default. Their site offers some workarounds but "Fire OS" is a lot more locked down. For example using the normal ADB command to turn the screen upside down (needed for my projector) is not working either.
- Really a shame. I bought a new TV with Android OS because it isn't locked down, and gifted my BF my old Fire Stick because he got a TV with the shitty Samsung OS. Wish i could block the new ads for him.
I found that the following helped: by never turning it off it just continues where it left off last time it was used. This assumes power is independent of TV.

Useful Settings This ADB command kills the sleep timer:

adb shell settings put secure sleep_timeout 0 and this ADB command kills the screensaver:

adb shell settings put system screen_off_timeout 2147460000

I have blokada on mine I had whitelisted all the amazon servers it connects with but when I read this I removed them all to stop it updating hopefully.

Will probably work until I get round to trying the xda fix.

Does that help? For me it doesn't stop anything. It looks like it uses DoH or something to bypass filtering.
- Well mine didn't update at all until I manually added the servers from amazon it was blocking by default.
  
  So I kind of assume taking them off again is a temporary solution. That said I can't guarantee they haven't changed anything since then and I might wake up to a worse fire cube sometime.
Firesticks use a hardcoded backup DNS which can't be changed/disabled without root access. This renders DNS level blocking useless because they'll just use their backup DNS if your DNS resolves to 127.0.0.1/0.0.0.0

I've noticed they have added this trick to my FireCube. When it's first powered on it looks for the remote and often doesn't find it. Then as you press a button on it, it clicks the first show or movie being advertised.

I didn't pay top dollar for a cube to deal with this crap.

I'm finding I'm using my laptop more than my cube these days. I'm also cancelling services as I go. Arrrhh time to go!

I picked up a 4K Fire Stick a few years back, connected it to my Wi-Fi and then watched the network activity from the router with little surprise. Tech companies sell ad-delivery devices with a nominal end-user benefit.

Once NUCs became powerful and affordable enough to use as a dedicated HTPC/server, anything with a proprietary OS made no sense, even taking portability into consideration. This is just the latest example of why.

Why would anyone ever buy a "smart" item? I don't understand why a market for them exists. People truly are fucking retards.

The 'r' word is considered a slur and is NOT nice...Please. be(e) nice at Beehaw. Thanks.
- Is it possible to remove this comment? It brings nothing except a slur
Calling names without understanding what’s actually going on is always a great start.

"Smart" seems to just mean internet connected. Basically all TV watching (at least in my experience) has moved to streaming, so you need a connection somewhere. Either TVs have it built in (and show you ads in the output selection menu – I’ve seen this) or you connect something else to it that streams content. The Fire TV stick was a cheap way to do this, Fire TVs are cheap TVs.

I’ve been using an Apple TV and capped the wifi connection of my TV, works great and no ads.
From the article, it sounds like this affects people with a dumb TV who use some kind of hardware gizmo that Amazon sells to be a streaming endpoint.

I think that it's really more linked with streaming services than with smart TVs.
How do you play your 4K movie files on a TV using a small remote? Firetv + Plex does exactly that and does it pretty great while only 35€. Does that make me a retard?

There are lots of low cost single board computers that can run Kodi and Jellyfin which are open source and don't have any ads.

Currently have everything Amazon blocked so it doesn’t update, and everything on the default Home screen is blank or missing except the home icon and settings menu.

Installed “Wolf Launcher” and “Launcher Manager” to set it to the Home button, and “Launch on Boot” to automatically start Wolf Launcher after the default home screen is done loading nothing.

Everything behind a pihole to block Amazon and Twitch ads, plus SmartTubeNext for youtube with adblock and sponsorblock.

https://reddthat.com/comment/5220903

People buy Firesticks and run the Amazon software?

What a disconnected statement. Every once in a while I recommend going into the real world (yes I know it's scary) and exploring your relationships out side of the internet
Man I hate this flippant pseudointelligent passive-aggressive crap.

Yes, not everyone missed their childhood to learn Linux like we did. People don’t have the time or knowledge to build their own streaming box. None of their friends are ever impressed when they do anyway.

Those people are all busy specializing in something else, so that you or I don’t have to learn to farm, or manufacture Cheetos, or keep the water running.

This is being extremely exploited by late-stage capitalism now, however. What we need are some ethical choices for stuff like smart devices, things that don’t need “cloud connection” just so your phone can turn your lights on. FFS they’re right next to each other, we don’t need to bring CloudFlare into this.
- What we need are some ethical choices for stuff like smart devices, things that don’t need “cloud connection” just so your phone can turn your lights on.
  
  IKEA's smart stuff is the best out there for the average consumer. Manages to be something that "just works" whilst also being fully local, no cloud connection, uses open standard APIs and provides firmware updates as downloads.
- Man I hate this flippant pseudointelligent passive-aggressive crap.
  
  Then proceeds to spew different pseudo intelligent passive-aggressive crap. 🥴😮‍💨
  
  We're not talking about installing Linux or anything close. We're talking about downloading an app, paying for an IPTV subscription and a VPN. 🫠
Hi there, is there alternative software that can be installed instead? Any recommendations?
- https://www.firesticktricks.com/smart-iptv.html
- I don't have a firestick, but they might just be meaning a different launcher. I use this one on a Shield. Works great. https://www.firesticktricks.com/wolf-launcher.html

My FireTV is rotting away in a cabinet. While I am certainly no Apple fan I switched to an AppleTV a while ago and I am happy with it.

Using the right apps I can still watch videos from my network drive so I am not chained to streaming services.

The UI is kept refreshingly simple and no ads anywhere.

As a display I use a "dumb" 4K-Beamer which does one thing (display) and does it very good. No need for smart features.