Amazon Injects Ads Into Fire TV Downtime (cordcuttersnews.com) 39
Amazon has introduced new advertising strategies for its Fire TV platform, displaying full-screen ads before screensavers activate on idle devices, CordCutters reports. Users have observed ads from various brands during these pre-screensaver intervals, the report added.
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Obligatory Futurama quote:
Sure we had advertisements. They were on billboards and milk cartons and bathroom walls. They were even written in the sky. But not in our dreams, no way....
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Should have looked it up rather than typing from my recollection:
Leela : Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry : Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams.
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well,
except for the sheep.
Alternatives? (Score:4)
Seriously, what is a good equivalent alternative? All I give a shit about is running Plex and maybe a Youtube replacement like SmartTubeNext with support for *265/HEVC and maybe future-proof with AV1 and the ability to properly pass through HDR, Atmos and similar content properly. I don't care about any other streaming services.
There are two main things that bother me with Fire Stick/TV devices: Ads, and the timeout/screensaver. Leave anything paused for more than a couple minutes and you get kicked out, regardless of screensaver settings.
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I have a Beelink EQ12 mini pc that's running a web browser to access my Emby server.
Works like a charm. Probably quite a bit more expensive than a Fire Stick... but frankly freedom and principles have a price tag.
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I don't remember if it was Kodi or Plex, but I've had issues with windows apps before and I think Jellyfin didn't even offer one so I haven't yet tried the Emby app.
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Ah, now I remember:
Emby Theater was very limited without a license. I didn't have a license back then and never remembered to try again.
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Yeah, unfortunately the HTPC route is likely the only good answer. I'd kill for something at least in the ballpark of an 'appliance' level option though.
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https://osmc.tv/vero/ [osmc.tv]
OSMC Vero is pretty neat. You need some mildly technical chops to set it up, I have it sourcing files via NFS from a bigger machine. I think the system that runs on it is what Kodi is based upon.
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"Seriously, what is a good equivalent alternative?"
A SmartTV with android built in, or an android box (Like the NVIDIA Shield)
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Computer! (Score:2)
Use a computer like a laptop/notebook. Maybe miniPC, rPi, tablet, etc. can do it.
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For the love of everything, Please do not get an Nvidia Shield. They have been milking the market and though it would do what you want with 5 year old tech, its too expensive for what it is.
There are a ton of "tv boxes" available that run straight up android, so you can set them up to run whatever launcher and whatever apps you want such as Plex, Kodi and SmartTube.
The Rbox series are popular and the one I have works well. I generally am a Kodi household so I put Coreelec on it and its great for my needs.
Th
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Yeah, people have been pushing the Shield on me for as long as I've groaned about the Fire Sticks, but not enough bang for the buck.
I used various Android based devices prior to the Fire Stick, but at that point they were way underpowered. I guess I need to look at some more modern ones.
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For the love of everything, Please do not get an Nvidia Shield. They have been milking the market and though it would do what you want with 5 year old tech, its too expensive for what it is. There are a ton of "tv boxes" available that run straight up android, so you can set them up to run whatever launcher and whatever apps you want such as Plex, Kodi and SmartTube. The Rbox series are popular and the one I have works well. I generally am a Kodi household so I put Coreelec on it and its great for my needs. They are cheaper at the Ali site then the jungle site, but also there are lots of "fakes" out there. Generally they are the same hardware, just lower quality components.
There are also ways to disable the screen saver and sleep completely on the fireTV currently. You have to remote ADB into the device, but you can do it. You still get ads on the main page but, with sleep disabled, Plex should never close.
I appreciate that Amazon sells the hardware so inexpensively, and it generally just works, which is nice for the less technical users. But I also am tired of being inundated with ads. Its to the point that I specifically avoid products that I am forced to watch ads for. - And get off my lawn too!
You can put an alternate launcher on the shield as well but yes Nvidia jumped the shark and is no longer worth the money. To be fair, Google forced the ads on them but still, it killed a decent platform.
one of my other streaming channels does this (Score:2)
and...so? (Score:2)
I get that much of what is in the stick is open source, but a lot still isn't, particularly the work it takes to integrate it all, manage the upgrade processes, hosting your settings on the Amazon cloud servers so another stick has many of the same things.
That costs money, a lot more than $29 for a 4K on prime day is going to cover.
So they run advertising. And it is what it is. I don't get the whole "OMG ADVERTISING EVERYWHERE WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE WHEN SKYNET HACKS AMZ!!!!!" attitude is. If you really don't
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I don't get the whole "OMG ADVERTISING EVERYWHERE WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE WHEN SKYNET HACKS AMZ!!!!!" attitude is.
Your characterization of the opposition is borderline schizophrenic. Not wanting to see ads is reason enough.
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Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams! Only on tv and radio...and in magazines...and movies. And at ball games, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams! No sirree."
For their next step... (Score:4, Interesting)
Your TV will randomly turn on and play advertisements of you have not had it powered on in a certain length of time. Remember, streaming devices can control your TV's power, input, and volume with HDMI-CEC.
Actually, likely even if your TV does not support that tech. The remote is a Bluetooth accessory and can do control via IR, so as long as it's sitting where it can still successfully send a signal to the TV the streaming device can just ask the remote to turn the TV on if it can't do it itself.
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Future versions are likely to drop the "OFF" button altogether. It it's plugged in, it's on.
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Future versions are likely to drop the "OFF" button altogether. It it's plugged in, it's on.
Sounds like the 1960s movie Fahrenheit 451 and it's "parlor TV" machines that took up entire walls in a home and always seemed to be switched ON.
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Your TV will randomly turn on and play advertisements of you have not had it powered on in a certain length of time.
It will be interesting to determine whether it's capable of doing this when not connected to the TV to supply it with power. And if it turns out to have an internal battery to allow it to do so without an external power source, then I expect that there will be a market for appropriately-sized Faraday cages that the Fire TV device can be dropped into. I wonder if, unless there is _specific_ verbiage in the rarely-read ToS document that states that you agree that Amazon is allowed to do so, turning on your TV
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It will be interesting to determine whether it's capable of doing this when not connected to the TV to supply it with power.
Fire Sticks require an external power adapter. If you install one as designed and sold by Amazon you're not powering it with the TV. I think only the older low-end 1080p sticks were capable of running off a TVs USB power plug. Note that any TV USB power dongles for the current ones are 1) third-party, and 2) have a small module in-line that likely contains capacitors for supplementing during high-load tasks. It's more of a "hope this is enough extra juice" situation.
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I don't doubt that at all. Only advertising executives could see logic in displaying ads when people are not watching TV.
FireTV has been going down hill for a while (Score:3)
Firstly if would drop out of the app to the home screen and you would have to navigate back to the app every time you powered on.
Then it became flaky on some devices with the apps freezing after running for a while, forcing the closing and reopening of the app on what had been a stable solution for many years. This is when I started looking for alternatives.
Then it started play promos on the home screen after a few seconds.
Then it started playing promos quicker than the TV could start up. So you needed to power on the TV and blindly navigate to the app list so you weren't blasted with a noisy promo for the shit Amazon though for some insane reason I would watch.
Then they changed the number if steps to the app list sometimes with promos on each side so you still got blasted sometimes.
I found that the best alternative for my use case was LibreELEC running on a 1GB RPi 4. They are quite cheap and robust. Paired with a Fire TV style remote from China and I'm back to the user experience that I liked with the Fire TV in the early days. I found the same NAS that held my content could serve as a PXE boot source for the RPi and paired with a PoE board on the RPi made for a solution I could quickly deploy.
So the as the Fire TV experience continues to deteriorate I have accelerated the role out of replacing them. All Amazon have been really doing is accelerating the production of e-waste.
Re: FireTV has been going down hill for a while (Score:2)
Then it started playing promos quicker than the TV could start up. So you needed to power on the TV and blindly navigate to the app list so you weren't blasted with a noisy promo for the shit Amazon though for some insane reason I would watch.
There's a setting to disable this on the Fire Stick preferences. It's the "Featured Content" section.
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There's a setting to disable this on the Fire Stick preferences.
...for now.
Intrusive ad equals automatic boycott (Score:2)
Ads on desktop, program menus or pause screens are just as bad as scam phone calls and companies resorting to these should pay the price.