When Amazon launched its new Fire TV user interface earlier this year, I was pretty impressed. It looks great, feels snappy, and I really like that you can now pin up to 20 apps to the home screen — a huge improvement over the previous limit of just six. But if there’s one thing that still bothers me, it’s that Amazon (unsurprisingly) didn’t do anything to reduce the constant stream of ads and recommendations the interface throws at you.
To make matters worse, Amazon has also started experimenting with a new full-screen ad format that forces you to acknowledge an ad and manually dismiss it before you can get back to using your device. The first time the company did this was back in May to promote its redesigned Fire TV app. Now it’s at it again, but this time it’s trying to convince select Fire Stick users to buy a brand-new device.
As first spotted on Reddit, Amazon’s latest full-screen ad targets users with older Fire Sticks with the tagline, “It’s time for an upgrade” (via AFTV News). You can check out what the ad looks like below:
As you can see above, the ad offers a steep discount on the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus, letting eligible users pick one up for just $15 instead of the usual $50.
The deal is great, the ad format isn’t
You have to press “Got it” to get rid of the ad
To be fair, the deal Amazon is pushing here is actually pretty good. If you have an older Fire TV Stick, getting the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus for just $15 is an incredible value.
More importantly, the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus still runs Fire OS, the Android-based operating system Amazon has used on its Fire TV devices for well over a decade. That’s in contrast to the newer Fire TV Stick 4K Select, Amazon’s latest entry-level 4K streaming stick, which runs Vega OS, the company’s new Linux-based operating system that doesn’t support sideloading.
If you want to see whether you’re eligible for the deal, you can visit the page linked here, which will tell you if your Amazon account qualifies.
That said, while the deal itself is good, I just wish Amazon would advertise it another way instead of forcing a pop-up ad that you have to dismiss yourself by pressing a button that literally says, “Got it.”
The Fire TV home screen already has a massive ad carousel which is front and center when you open it, and Amazon could easily promote deals like this there — or in any of the other ad placements already packed into the interface — instead of interrupting users with this pop-up format.
…despite my gripes with Amazon’s advertising, I’d still argue it’s less annoying than Roku’s.
Given that Amazon has used this format twice now, it seems like it’s here to stay. So far, though, the company has only used this new pop-up format to promote its own products and services, not any third-party apps or products — at least not yet.
Ads are nothing new on streaming devices. Fire TV, Roku, and Google TV are all guilty of throwing plenty of them your way. The only platform that’s largely ad-free is Apple TV, but that’s also because it’s the most expensive mainstream streaming platform, with the Apple TV 4K starting at $200 after Apple recently raised prices. Cheaper devices like Fire TV Sticks, Roku players, and the Google TV Streamer can be sold at lower prices because these companies offset some of that cost through advertising. However, Roku has had to raise prices recently because of the ongoing memory shortage, too.
That said, despite my gripes with Amazon’s advertising, I’d still argue it’s less annoying than Roku’s. Roku has been known to replace your entire home screen wallpaper out of the blue to promote a movie, TV show, or product, which I find even more intrusive than the new ad pop-ups on Fire TV.
- Operating System
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Fire OS
- Resolution
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4K, Dolby Vision, HDR10
- Ports
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HDMI
- RAM/storage
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2GB RAM/8GB storage
