Every day, the reasons to either switch to dumb devices or open-source software keep piling up.

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.

A lot of the fire tvs can be rooted! There’s a great community over at XDA with all the needed resources.

I have two 4k sticks (1st gen) rooted and debloated running Leanback launcher. When you cut out all the junk, it really is (or was?) the best 4k streaming device under $50.

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

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.

"Smart" devices are not smart for us, they are devices the manufacturers get to control

please tell me i can do something with ADB against that. my boyfriend is already annoyed at those, and i want to do something against it. no root sadly.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Currently have everything Amazon blocked so it doesn’t update, and everything on the default Home screen is blank or missing except the home icon and settings menu.

Installed “Wolf Launcher” and “Launcher Manager” to set it to the Home button, and “Launch on Boot” to automatically start Wolf Launcher after the default home screen is done loading nothing.

Everything behind a pihole to block Amazon and Twitch ads, plus SmartTubeNext for youtube with adblock and sponsorblock.

https://reddthat.com/comment/5220903

People buy Firesticks and run the Amazon software?