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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fair enough, I wasn’t aware of that. I guess they added those at one point.
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.
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
The Lemmy community is probably not the most representative group of people when it comes to consumer electronics. I doubt that most people plug their laptops into their TV every time they want to watch something. But fair enough.
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
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!
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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
Done
Thanks!
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.
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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.
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.
Blokada overrides the dns to its own and even then I don’t see how dns is at all relevant because it blocks the update server from being connected with.
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.
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