That’s why piracy is back on the menu.
Or you know have the sense god gave goats and be able to see the neon sign as they have been blowing out Amazon home devices for years. Now they need to recoup that half decade of losses. Buckle up.
Honestly, this is why we are here. I get it if you use their delivery because getting stuff can be hard depending on the area. But this stuff, where there are half dozen competing options… come on.
I wasn’t specifically talking about this product alone, but about the general trend. I don’t own any Amazon hardware.
A few years ago, piracy was all but dead because or really good offers like Netflix. All the stuff you wanted was there and the price was ok.
Now to get the same that you got for a tenner a month on Netflix, you have to pay for half a dozen of streaming services.
Youtube forces you to watch more ads than actual content. All services are increasing prices while decreasing what you are getting for that money. And all sorts of products are retroactively introducing ads.
I mean seriously, if someone bought that stick, they paid for it. They shouldn’t have to worry about updates actively making the device worse.
It’s an industry-wide trend that sucks, and it’s one that creates resistance. People start pirating, use adblock and some hack their devices. Not because it’s impossible to have a situation that suits everyone, but because they purpously use enshittification to suck more money out of their customers.
Your gripes about inflation are justified.
All I’m saying there were so many red flags on buying these that you’d have to be new to technology to not have seen this coming. I’m actually surprised they weren’t doing or worse from day one 🤷♂️
It’s unbelievable. The dumb fuckers literally figured out a way to beat piracy. High quantity, easily accessible content at an appetizable price. Even one for TV, one for music, $10-15 a month, I had no issue. Everyone made out like a bandit, I was satisfied, and they all made billions.
Now you can’t even use YouTube without being bombarded with ads, and streaming is quickly becoming worse than cable was. Piracy is definitely back on the table, and the fuckers don’t have license to whine about it this time. They literally had it licked, but then got too greedy, so fuck them.
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May we think about one more question also?
Why is this even possible? We should have this thing called software, that should be replecable without changing the hardware, right?
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Why do people still use those?
They’re cheap. That’s as far as some people think about it.
I use a fire stick because I’m familiar with them and they are much better than the shitty OS built into my TVs. Is there an alternative you recommend? I’m open to changing, especially with how theyve been pushing ads and paid rentals lately
Roku is pretty nice
Roku is literally chock full of ads, and they send whatever you’re watching back to their ad partners. I thought Roku was good too until I recently bought one of their top of the line boxes and it had ads _everywhere _ compared to my Roku tv. I immediately went out and bought an Apple TV and couldn’t be happier. No ads anywhere, and is way snappier than Roku.
Due to how they made it on scratch based on the Linux kernel, finding apps to install is hard. It doesn’t even have a web browser, let alone SmartTube.
If you have the money, I’d go for an NVIDIA Shield, or maybe an Apple TV. Well worth the money.
Otherwise, for budget, you could get a Chromecast, which gives you more control over it and has generally less garbage than the Fire TVs do for instance, since you can easily change its launcher and debloat with ADB.
I’ll second the Chromecast (specifically the “Google TV with Chromecast” or something like that). It sounds cover-intuitive because it does come with its own home screen full of ads, but putting things like smart tube and a custom launcher on is pretty trivial and it was only £25.
Apple TV. No ads at all, it’s faster than every alternative (unless you’re building your own server), and it is much easier to use than every alternative.
Easy to sideload apps and use it for streaming, and I’m too lazy to set up my *arr self hosted media server with jellyfin again.
At this point just get a rasbperry pi, or some similar device, and run it as a regular computer. Firefox, ublock origin, don’t worry about ads, and turn it into a machine that is capable of soooooooo much more. Hell, any PC will work. Steam Deck, NUC, that old laptop you have laying around? Been running little NUCs on my TVs for years and so happy I don’t have to put up with that nonsense.
The Fire TV Sticks are getting more unusable with every update.
don’t update them
Most updates are OTA. They don’t give you a choice
I think they’re recommending that you do something like firewall/piehole them
Yes.
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I’m sitting here watching Nvidia Shield, Amazon, and Windows, etc all cram ads into their shit and really reaaally hoping Apple doesn’t break on this one.
Roku
Roku has tons of Home Screen ads what are you talking about? It was so bad I spent about 5 minutes using it until I went and bought an Apple TV.
Are you talking about the static city scape that scrolls while occasionally showing still ads every once in a while? That doesn’t feel like the same thing at all. Of course I haven’t used my Roku since I hooked up a PS5 so maybe they’ve made it worse.
We were talking about Fullscreen are that you have to skip or watch, which they don’t have (at least not for me)
There’s some ad on the home screen I agree I don’t want but it’s nowhere near as annoying as on Android TV or FireTV. Mostly it just stays out of my way and lets me do things, and that’s it.
Indeed, though it still doesn’t have a web browser.
Pretty much unfortunately. The good thing is its trivially easy to change launchers on the NVIDIA Shield or Google TV devices, plus you can even go a step forward and debloat them entirely with ADB. Amazon’s really the only manufacturer I’d say that forces home screen ads with no choice around it, since they actively prevent changing launchers and such. But Apple is probably the only one out of the box with no advertising.
I complained about this to “support” a few days ago. A full screen ad before the home screen with the top 1/3 an ad and the bottom 1/3 ads.
Straight up told them I will pick another manufacturer this weekend.
I’m burned out on protecting myself from smart devices. Maybe just a dumb screen this round.
Edit: I have every single privacy setting set to off, but some update added a new category and defaults to on. Don’t know how long Amazon has been spying on me or what they took.
My device has autoplay off already. It may have stopped a full screen video ad, but there is a full screen picture ad instead.
A full screen ad before the home screen with the top 1/3 an ad and the bottom 1/3 ads.
We’re almost there
Why would support care, this is clearly a feature not a bug. Did you at least demand a refund on the device?
Glad I don’t really watch content anymore. Though, between the Roku TV my kid has, and the big Samsung TV in our living room…my pihole is constantly hammered by both of them.
Isn’t a firestick basically a chromecast? I mean, google is a shitty company in matters about privacy or ethics, but amazon isn’t much better
I can cast to my internet-disabled TV anything to it, including pirate streaming sites with no ads. 20 years ago I ran a hdmi from my desktop and used a wireless touchpad to load downloaded stuff. It truly is the golden age of piracy
They’re more like AndroidTV boxes with a full menu and HDMI-CEC support, only they came out back in the day when Chromecasts were just for casting. They were also dirt cheap; unfortunately that’s because they were made with bargain-basement parts which often failed or started to overheat easily a few months in.
Yeah, Chromecasts are much better than Fire TV’s, due to the more control you have over them and how easy it is change the launcher vs. Amazon actively preventing it. Basically same price and budget as well. Plus Google running a newer version of Android in general vs. Amazon’s, etc. Chromecasts are probably lesser of the two evils imo.
If I hadn’t already disabled autoplays and blocked it from dialing home for updates, this might be a concern.
I have a fire tv cube just direct launch into apps to avoid this. For example instead of powering on the fire tv with power button I tell Alexa to open the app I need.
Down side is this doesn’t really work with sieloaded apps like smart tube
Sounds like this can be better avoided by not having an fire TV cube at all
Lols :)
