AMAZON Fire TV owners are vowing to ditch their gadgets after controversial changes to the app.
Customers have flocked to Reddit to complain about the quality of their Amazon Fire TVs and Sticks.
AmazonIf you’re having issues with your Amazon Fire TV, you’re not alone – but a simple settings tweak may save you[/caption]
The gadgets promise a smarter TV experience, but some owners are unhappy with how well the devices perform lately – or how easy it is to find content.
In a Reddit thread with dozens of upvotes, a poster wrote: “What happened to Fire TV? I just purchased a new one, so it’ s not that.
“You have to scroll through layers upon layers to get to what you want to watch, you can’t escape the previews, it’s slow, it kicks itself out of the show or doesn’t go there at all.”
A separate user replying in the comments added: “I used to recommend them but not anymore. It’s hot garbage now.”
Another said: “Funny you mention that. I’m in the process of removing all Amazon devices (Fire TV and Echo) from my ecosystem. Trust is gone!”
And one noted: “Yeah they’re going downhill fast. I left the ecosystem a few months back”
A different user said that they’d swapped their Fire TV devices for an Apple TV.
They wrote: “Yes it’s more expensive but after having Fire Sticks on all my tvs for years I’m slowly phasing them out.
“It was the absolute best decision I’ve ever made. Set it so it opens to the Home Screen (instead of the default Apple TV+ app) and you have zero clutter or nonsense.
“Just the apps that you use. No slow and clunky navigation and no bulls***.”
The complaints come despite a recent Amazon Fire TV ad posted to YouTube that promises users can “scroll less, watch more”.
One user suggested a solution of turning autoplay videos off as a way to ease some of the problem.
Just go into Settings > Preferences > Featured Content then look for Allow Audio Autoplay and Allow Video Autoplay.
Set both of these to off and that should reduce most of the autoplay issues that you might experience.
One replied: “Gets out of bed so I don’t forget to do this”, while another simply added: “THIS.”
But it wasn’t enough for the original poster who wrote that they’d already tried it: “Yeah I did this, but thanks for the suggestion.”
Another said: “I did it too, but some things still autoplay.”
BAD ADS
Amazon has been under fire recently for the addition of ads to its streaming service.
Last year, Amazon announced that it would start showing “limited ads” on Prime Video.
And the change went live on January 29 this year, affecting paying users of the service.
If subscribers want to remove ads, they need to pay an extra $2.99 on top of their existing subscription.
But Amazon noted: “”We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.”
Amazon Video subscribers have since revealed that they’ve cancelled their memberships outright.
One user in the Reddit thread said that they’d ditched their bedroom Fire TV and started using an Xbox instead: “As a bonus, everything loads WAY faster.
“I’d much rather just use my fire TV, but I absolutely hate ads and pay for an ad free experience on literally everything I subscribe to.”
The U.S. Sun has asked Amazon for comment and will update this article with any response.