Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV • Hacker News Board

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#151

Post by somethingwitty1 » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

fffrantz wrote: post #140

sdflhasjd wrote: post #6

My shield updated to this the other day. I'm pretty furious about it, it's not a cheap device, and it's certainly not Google's. To be adding these "features" without asking, irrespective of whatever agreement between me, Nvidia or Google exists, is ridiculous. I know it's in whatever terms I, uh, "accepted", but there's just no escaping it in this day and age. Fortunately, I know how to use ADB and just installed ano…

No need to sideload anything. Just remove all updates of the Android TV launcher in the settings and disable auto updates. You'll get the good ol' launcher.

No unfortunately that may not work. Even if you revert all updates, the old launcher now has the ad. It appears they are doing this from their service side somehow. I removed all updates and disabled updates, but it didn't work. Mine required side-loading a launcher.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#152

Post by js2 » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

sdflhasjd wrote: post #25

djrogers wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple is seems almost as bad too. There's recommendations that I don't want. The main AppleTV UI doesn’t have any recommendations for streaming apps you don’t own - the only thing that’s even close are when you highlight one of the apps in the top bar.

That is certainly better than the Shield, which is giving me recommendations for stuff I don't subscribe to. As far as I understand though, is that it will show recommendations provided by installed apps. I do have Prime, and I still don't really want recommendations without explicitly asking for it.

FWIW, I own both a Shield Pro and an Apple TV. I use my Apple TV most of the time. I find it a much nicer interface. The only time I use the Shield is with Plex for watching Blu-rays that I've ripped because it supports pass-through of Dolby TrueHD and the Apple TV does not.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#153

Post by skizm » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

Does pi-hole resolve this?

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#154

Post by sofixa » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #72

Speaking of this, YouTube changed recently for me and now unskippable ads are 15 seconds and if you watch them on a chromecast you can’t skip them from your phone anymore. You have to go into “remote control mode” and navigate the on-screen UI. Nothing grinds my gears worse than stuff you buy and integrate into your life unnecessarily degrading in performance/behaviour. I might actually be about done with YouTube, wh…

The correct thing to do for YouTube is to pay for the ad-free Premium version ( which also supports "content creators" more).

A lot of people say they'd pay if they were given the option to remove ads, yet surprisingly few people opt to do it for YouTube ( which you can even share with friends and family up to 5 accounts, so it can be a decent deal). Why?

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#155

Post by lrvick » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

I had a couple of these and dropped them months ago for Kodi boxes as I sought to remove user-hostile proprietary products from my life.

Extra happy with this choice now.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#156

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

lucioperca wrote: post #18

Stallman told you so.

Would any of his advice prevented this?

The user can go change the launcher.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#157

Post by wil421 » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #112

cameldrv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when Apple used to charge for MacOS and iOS updates. In many ways this aligned incentives much better. Many of the MacOS and iOS updates in the past few years have mostly existed to drive subscription revenue for their new services. I'd love them to actually have to deliver real value with software updates and be paid for it.

The whole iCloud “omg almost out of space!!” nag screens really irked me on iOS, and doubly so because of their usage of private APIs to both show those nag screens and how the iCloud service works in a way that no other service can, again due to the private APIs they use. I pay for it now begrudgingly because it does “just work”, but I also hate them for it as I’d rather have a choice of cloud storage providers that…

I used to use the One Drive app to backup my photos on my iDevices. The biggest pain was the first upload taking forever and it was not automatic. My use case was a secondary back up so it didn’t bother me.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#158

Post by sdflhasjd » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #56

ssimpson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube app update and now has a huge banner ad at the top when you start it up. Very annoying!

This is Apple's fault how?

Not that it's Apple's fault that YouTube has ads. But Apple don't seem to allow any alternative YouTube clients on the store.

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#159

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

Sebb767 wrote: post #144

sdflhasjd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the Shield TV really does seem to have some of the best hardware and sort of "just works" I'd normally just have a Linux box with Kodi, but once you try to get 4K HDR working, things start getting prickly. GPU and driver combos were a bit of a pain and even Windows had issues.

I had the exact same problems. Especially when you're trying to get Netflix out PrimeVideo in 4K, you're pretty much out of open source options.

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

#160

Post by munk-a » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #148

wildrhythms wrote: post #13

It's really incredible how the average American home spends some $116/mo for television[1], and is still subjected to 16 minutes of advertisements per hour of entertainment. [1] https://www.doxo.com/insights/united-states-of-bill-pay-doxo...

I suppose it's the price of convenience? For my part, I pay a lot less for just Internet, borrow DVDs from the public library, and occasionally pay a la carte to stream specific shows I particularly want to watch. It's definitely less expensive in the long run, but my real motivation is that I really hate ads, enough so that I'm willing to put up with lower definition (the library doesn't do as much in the way of blu…

I don't know if it's fair to describe cable TV as convenience. Netflix costs about a tenth as much as cable TV (though it does require Internet so if you'd otherwise not have Internet maybe bump it up to half the cost) and provides a generally better service.

People are paying out of laziness.