Amazon Fire TV devices have found a new and annoying way to smack you in the face with ads

Well, that sucks.

If you have a Fire TV product of some kind, I did that probably I noticed In the past few weeks, every time you turn on the device, a full-screen ad plays instead of the home screen display.

At first, I thought it was some kind of mistake on my part. That I somehow pressed a button while my TV was starting up that triggered the ad, but then my husband started noticing this phenomenon on his Fire TV as well.

Unfortunately, this is a feature, not a bug.

Elias Saba also finished in AFTV News I mentioned recentlyIt appears that the new update has changed the default location of the Fire TV cursor. Now, instead of starting the cursor in the navigation menu, it starts in the big banner ad that always takes up half of the main Fire TV menu. Since highlighting a banner at any time triggers the ad, the first thing Fire TV does upon startup is send you an ad.

There doesn’t seem to be a real solution to this. You can disable video ads on the home screen by going to the Settings menu, choosing Preferences, then Featured Content, then turning off the “Allow video autoplay” option, but that only replaces the video ads with a static image. (While you’re in these settings, you may also want to disable automatic audio playback as well in case there are kids or pets that might accidentally turn on the TV.) After turning this option off, now when the TV starts up I get a slideshow instead of a video . Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for the ad to finish, you can quickly press the home button or tap the cursor to bring up the home screen.

I get that as long as there was “content” and there were ads. I’m fine with that. I accept that making things I want to watch costs money, and that advertising is a way to generate some of that money. But it’s the increasingly destructive delivery system of these relatively benign parts of our culture that I have a problem with. Pop-up ads are nothing new, as anyone who remembers connecting to the Internet via phone can attest to. Even pop-up ads on TVs are nothing newbut there’s a reason why significant resources are devoted to reducing their online influence – we simply don’t want this particular flavor of nonsense, removed.

Since Amazon is hell-bent on ruining my experience, from now on, I’ll be watching TV exclusively from the last place relatively unspoilt by ads — my Xbox.