Nvidia Shield TV owners are upset at the recent addition of ads on their home screen but, while owners of the Chromecast with Google TV have always had ads, they too have reason to be upset. Google TV on the home screen of the 2020 Chromecast has switched from a slideshow of static image ads to autoplaying video ads, according to 9To5Google. Thankfully, you still have to pause for a bit on the banner ad before videos begin to play, but highlighting the ad banner happens often since it sits between the navigation menu and the app row. This behavior of autoplaying video ads, when highlighted, has been the norm on Fire TV devices, but unlike on Fire TV devices where you can completely turn off all video ads, there is no way to stop the new video ads from autoplaying on Google TV.
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Jeez, it’s almost like they want to push us all into using generic chinese boxes.
While I understand the motivation for ads, money, I just don’t get the advantage of assaulting us with video previews we can’t turn off. Who likes this? How many purchases do they get, compared to instances like me where I rush through each entry before it starts, rather than considering something I may not be looking for otherwise.
I especially don’t get it in Amazon Prime where I’m going through movies that are free to me, and no purchase is even possible.
I didn’t use Netflix for the longest time until they finally added a way to disable auto-play while browsing. The only reason Prime Video’s auto-play doesn’t drive me bat-S crazy is that there is no reason to stop when browsing without clicking through to the detail page where it doesn’t auto-play.
Regardless, it amazes me that there are, or must be, (conscious) people in the world that actually start watching something because of auto-play.
It’s all about the revenue, the streaming, the entire WEB. Unless you know what to do its 12.00 a month just to watch Youtube ad free.
I use the Wolf launcher on all my devices, Shield, Chromecast, and Cubes. Good ole Roku still have the simplest, cleanest interface without all the bullshoot.
The Internet is pretty much unusable without uBlock.