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After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

arstechnica.com

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Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#21

Post by vladvasiliu »

smoldesu wrote: post #2

Amazon's FireTV experience is pretty bad. Even as someone who pays for Prime, it's hard to escape the "ad carousel" interface when you just want to watch TV. That being said , I still use mine regularly for one reason; sideloading. You can install YouTube clients with SponsorBlock and ad-skipping built in. You can download Steam's streaming client and connect a controller, or load up Kodi with SFTP streaming from you…

> Even as someone who pays for Prime, it's hard to escape the "ad carousel" interface when you just want to watch TV.

I've recently (last week-ish) started to get the ads, too (I'm in France). But they don't seem to have made their way in the actual Prime Video app. I actually always used the "app" because I much preferred the organization.

Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#22

Post by sneak »

whalesalad wrote: post #7

The trick is to never give your TV access to the internet and to pair it with an Apple TV. If you buy a TV and it won't even boot or work without an internet connection - return it and get a different one.

Apple TVs in the default configuration show large video ads for Apple stuff in the hero unit on the homescreen, same as Amazon is being accused of doing in TFA.

Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#23

Post by aldanor »

isoprophlex wrote: post #4

Well don't worry. You buy a premium "lifestyle tv" like a Samsung Frame, and the moment you connect it to the internet, it too slams every user interface panel full of advertising. This amazon is shit egregious, but par for the course. They're hardly the only ones. TVs are enshittified pretty badly. Thankfully my Samsung forgot those ads after wiping it to factory defaults. So now it is only connected to the apple tv…

Why connect any tv to internet?

Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#24

Post by EricE »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #16
whalesalad wrote: post #7

The trick is to never give your TV access to the internet and to pair it with an Apple TV. If you buy a TV and it won't even boot or work without an internet connection - return it and get a different one.

That works fine with a TV. I bought one knowing that the "smart" features weren't all that great. I tried connecting it to the internet, and it felt more sluggish, although it's a brand new 2023 model. I was able to reset it to factory defaults and it's working well enough for what I bought it for (the image is very good, at least for my needs). For reference, it's a TCL with Google TV. But the Fire TV TFA talks abou…

you can still stream stuff - just use something else and just leverage it as a cheap display.

Unless it won't work if not connected to the internet (wouldn't put it past them).

I bought my Xbox mainly because it was the best/cheapest option for a 4K bluray player. I think I've loaded a game on it a handful of times at best, but watched lots of movies and other content with it. Thanks gamers for subsidizing a great BR player!

Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#25

Post by wkat4242 »

smoldesu wrote: post #2

Amazon's FireTV experience is pretty bad. Even as someone who pays for Prime, it's hard to escape the "ad carousel" interface when you just want to watch TV. That being said , I still use mine regularly for one reason; sideloading. You can install YouTube clients with SponsorBlock and ad-skipping built in. You can download Steam's streaming client and connect a controller, or load up Kodi with SFTP streaming from you…

Which YouTube client do you use if I may ask?

Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#26

Post by EricE »

sneak wrote: post #22
whalesalad wrote: post #7

The trick is to never give your TV access to the internet and to pair it with an Apple TV. If you buy a TV and it won't even boot or work without an internet connection - return it and get a different one.

Apple TVs in the default configuration show large video ads for Apple stuff in the hero unit on the homescreen, same as Amazon is being accused of doing in TFA.

If only defaults could be changed :p

Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#27

Post by kxrm »

RajT88 wrote: post #9
kxrm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to use internal DNS, which complicates things. I have the same TVs I resolved this with my router utilizing a firewall rule that redirects all udp port 53 traffic back to my pihole.

See - that would work if our TV was sending out DNS requests. It doesn't though! Like, it seems like it has its own truly internal DNS resolver, which gets updated I presume via OS updates.

Interesting, I wonder if newer OS updates are now using DoH. It's sad that I have to block upgrades for my TVs firmware for what could resolve potential security issues simply to have control over how my TV behaves on my network. This just re-enforces that I should continue to not let my TV upgrade it's firmware and continue to not let it access anything on the internet directly.

Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#28

Post by jdminhbg »

whalesalad wrote: post #7

The trick is to never give your TV access to the internet and to pair it with an Apple TV. If you buy a TV and it won't even boot or work without an internet connection - return it and get a different one.

Yup. People always complain that the AppleTV is too expensive vs the competition, but stuff like this is exactly why.

Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#29

Post by sneak »

aldanor wrote: post #23
isoprophlex wrote: post #4

Well don't worry. You buy a premium "lifestyle tv" like a Samsung Frame, and the moment you connect it to the internet, it too slams every user interface panel full of advertising. This amazon is shit egregious, but par for the course. They're hardly the only ones. TVs are enshittified pretty badly. Thankfully my Samsung forgot those ads after wiping it to factory defaults. So now it is only connected to the apple tv…

Why connect any tv to internet?

Many TVs now have dark patterns during setup that suggest initial configuration is impossible without network access. I recently set up a TV that required I scroll to the very bottom of the list of visible Wi-Fi networks to skip the network setup.

Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads

#30

Post by bombcar »

EricE wrote: post #24
vladvasiliu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works fine with a TV. I bought one knowing that the "smart" features weren't all that great. I tried connecting it to the internet, and it felt more sluggish, although it's a brand new 2023 model. I was able to reset it to factory defaults and it's working well enough for what I bought it for (the image is very good, at least for my needs). For reference, it's a TCL with Google TV. But the Fire TV TFA talks abou…

you can still stream stuff - just use something else and just leverage it as a cheap display. Unless it won't work if not connected to the internet (wouldn't put it past them). I bought my Xbox mainly because it was the best/cheapest option for a 4K bluray player. I think I've loaded a game on it a handful of times at best, but watched lots of movies and other content with it. Thanks gamers for subsidizing a great BR…

The key is to verify that the TV will return to just showing "HDMI 1" or whatever after power off.

Because the smart TVs have a history of returning to whatever ads they want to show after power on.

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