Late last year Amazon added fullscreen, autoplay video ads on Fire TV devices and, now, the company is toning those down just a little bit.
Autoplay ads on Fire TV first started showing up in November 2023 in an aggressive fashion. The ads would start playing as soon as your TV was turned on and, while they could be turned off, they were still incredibly frustrating and invasive as the default behavior.
Now, though, Amazon has toned things back a little bit.
Spotted by the folks over at CordCuttersNews, Amazon Fire TV now shows autoplay video ads with a small line of your apps in view. This essentially means that the UI is just pushed to the very bottom of the display, with the video taking up the majority of the display. Apparently, the change will be rolling out to all Fire TV devices released from 2016 or newer.
To exit the ad, you need to either press the home button or tap on an app shortcut to skip past the autoplaying video.
The ad also no longer appears immediately. It apparently takes a couple more seconds for the video to take over the screen and start playing, where it was previously the first thing you saw after the homescreen loaded. So, in theory, you can probably open an app or navigate away before the video even starts playing. That’s similar to, but still more aggressive than video ads on Google TV. On Google TV, video ads start playing after you manually navigate to the featured content row, at which point the ad starts playing.
This is probably a change for the best in terms of the user experience, but it’s still pretty aggressive compared to other streaming platforms.
What do you think?
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