Stop showing me ads on my TV player
Posted on
I am a huge fan of dumb TV's made smart via a TV player, something along the likes of an apple TV or a Roku.
The first device that I owned was the first generation of a google chromecast. It worked decently enough, but it would struggle when trying to play back some of the more higher definition media that I had.
I upgraded from the chromecast to a Roku 3. It worked splendidly for a while, up until they decided to take up half the home screen with a giant ad. This pissed me off. I already paid around $100-ish dollars for the damn thing. And now they want to shove ads down my throat.
I then upgraded to an amazon fire TV. These things were not available in Canada so I had to order it from the states. It came out to about $150 and also worked fine for a short period of time. That is until, you guessed it, they started showing ads on the home screen.
I am not against advertising and I understand why it exists and its use in free products. The issue is that these things are not free (or cheap). It sucks to pay for something and to have ads shown on top of that. The shittier part is that ads are sometimes for amazon's own products like prime video or prime music. I already have amazon prime. Why are you advertising these things to me? I paid for the hardware and have a subscription on top of that. Why am I getting ads? How much money is enough money?
This pissed me off enough that I spent my evening trying to get rid of them. FTVLaunchX is an project that will let you set your launcher to anything else. There's also aptoide that's worth mentioning (install untrusted apps at your own risk).
When I feel like spending some more money (yet again) for an ad free experience I will go for a vera from https://osmc.tv/
Please for goodness sake, stop showing me ads on my TV streamer! All I need you to do is stream content from my local network to my TV! If you want to show me ads, at least let me get the hardware without paying, otherwise bugger off.