Amazon Fire TV

Amazon may be showing more ads on Fire TV screensaver [U]

Ben Schoon | Jul 3 2024 - 12:20 pm PT

Amazon’s Fire TV platform has never really been light on ads, but it seems the company has been trying to find more locations to slip advertisements in as of late. Now, some Fire TV users have noticed that Amazon seems to be replacing the screensaver with more ads.

Update 7/4: Amazon told CordCuttersNews that these ads are a part of its “Ambient Experience,” but it appears they’ve been available for a while. AFTVNews explained in a conversation that this behavior has been in place for years, as noted by some users on Reddit. It seems possible that Amazon is simply showing this in an altered format or just to a wider audience, but we’re not completely sure what’s going on.

Our original coverage follows.

As reported by CordCuttersNews, Amazon appears to have updated Fire TV devices with a new screensaver than places a full-screen ad after the TV has been idle for a few seconds. Ads on a screensaver are nothing new – Roku does this frequently – but Amazon’s implementation seems fairly invasive seeing as it displays in fullscreen.

Notably, the ad doesn’t show forever. After 30 seconds or so, the ad is followed by your typical screensaver choice.

That said, it doesn’t seem like this is rolling out to all users. We couldn’t find any user reports of this behavior outside of the CordCuttersNews report, so it’s possible this isn’t rolling out widely, or perhaps is disabled by some other setting that has already been disabled by many.

This comes after Amazon toned back ads on Fire TV which, previously, would show up fullscreen as soon as the TV was turned on. As of last month, ads no longer took up the entire display, but were still pretty invasive. However, Amazon did allow users to turn it off in the Settings menu. It seems possible that that same setting also disables this new screensaver behavior.

Are you seeing ads before your screensaver on Amazon Fire TV? Let us know in the comments below.