Roku has done the same thing with their appliance. If anyone from Roku is listening, I would pay a significant premium to never again see an ad.
After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
131–140 of 292 posts
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#132The 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.
Meh, I own an LG CX and I have never seen a single ad on it - the app integration is so good I can't imagine needing to mess with another device just to use streaming services. Just don't buy ad-ridden crap from Samsung and others, I guess?
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve had Roku, FireTV, and Chromecast, and I have had hdcp and/or performance issues with everything but Apple TV. I hate that I’ve turned into something of an fanboy but Apple TV follows the same old story from Apple: expensive but it consistently just works.
> same old story from Apple: expensive but it consistently just works. Not to mention at least you know where they're hitting you - up front, on the hardware. It's like the people that complain about a Macbook being 20% more (or whatever), buying a PC-something, and then coming back complaining that Windows is loaded with ads or Linux has all kinds of issues on it. I'm with you - I went from being a die-hard Linux de…
Macbook costs like 3x compared to competitors. For example, Apple M1 8 Core score on cpubenchmark is about 14000. If you look for non-Apple laptops with equivalent CPU score, they would cost around $450. And they support Linux.
The only good thing in Macbook is display, which covers more than 100% of sRGB color space and has giantic resolution. I wish it could be bought separately and installed into a normal laptop.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#134Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#135Google has started to do the same thing making my nvidia shield a paperweight to me.
I have a fairly expensive Google TV and I have to navigate past rows of promoted content to get to the streaming apps I actually installed and want to use.
If you dig down into the account settings there is an "apps only" mode that brings back the grid.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do Apple TVs not display ads? I have Google TV devices, in part because I can install what er I want on them, including 3rd part launchers that don't have ads.
Apple TV advertises its own content when you are on the homepage (even as a non-Apple TV+ subscriber so it's a little more aggressive than like sitting on the Netflix homepage as a subscriber) but as far as I can tell nothing more than that. Been a user for the last 7-8 years and I love the UX.
Sony does this too
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's pretty shady indeed. But I guess that comes from how the majority of consumers use those tvs, not discerning the screen itself from software that provides content access.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> same old story from Apple: expensive but it consistently just works. Not to mention at least you know where they're hitting you - up front, on the hardware. It's like the people that complain about a Macbook being 20% more (or whatever), buying a PC-something, and then coming back complaining that Windows is loaded with ads or Linux has all kinds of issues on it. I'm with you - I went from being a die-hard Linux de…
Macbook costs like 3x compared to competitors. For example, Apple M1 8 Core score on cpubenchmark is about 14000. If you look for non-Apple laptops with equivalent CPU score, they would cost around $450. And they support Linux. The only good thing in Macbook is display, which covers more than 100% of sRGB color space and has giantic resolution. I wish it could be bought separately and installed into a normal laptop.
Apple Silicon Macbooks also support Linux.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#139My wife and I bought a Fire TV for a particular use case: - The hot tub room in the winter - The outdoor patio in the summer It was so cheap, we don't mind the ads on the home screen. If it dies from the moisture, we'll just buy another one. The apps are the key anyways, as I use a few totally ad-free apps to stream stuff: - JellyFin - VLC - HDHomeRun (for my antenna on the roof) PlutoTV is not ad-free, but has so mu…
Does it run Android? If so, you can try replacing the launcher with a user-friendly one.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#140If you own a FireTV stick or display you'll notice that the FreeVee streaming app has started to become more and more prominent. It's deceptively simple - they are taking old shows like Murder She Wrote and streaming them non-stop on a "channel" much like the old terrestrial broadcast networks did. They're solving the streaming problem for older customers that don't grok Netflix or Hulu. These shows take pseudo-comme…
>These shows take pseudo-commercial breaks and send you 2-3 ads tailored to you specifically. My wife didn't believe it until I did a simple Amazon search on my phone for automotive batteries. Not more than 30 minutes later the ads switched to some random LiPo battery for RVs. This is so depressing. We're living in the future and it's awful.
I'd much rather my ads be targeted than generic. It increases value on both sides here.
Comparing against the baseline of terrestrial broadcast, this is a far better experience than before.