The Fire TV “Ambient Experience,” which is just a fancy name for a screensaver, is supposed to beautify your room with artwork and photographs. Unfortunately, Amazon has decided that the Ambient Experience should be a source of revenue. Fire TV owners will now be greeted by an occasional advertisement when their TV or streaming box goes into screensaver mode.
You can’t have a smart TV without advertisements or sponsored content. However, customers say that Fire TV ads have grown more and more invasive. Amazon has added ads to the Fire TV home screen, the Fire TV startup screen, and now, the Fire TV screensaver. The fact that Prime Video is now inundated by ads just adds insult to injury.
These Ambient Experience ads are interactive—you can press the play/pause button on your remote to “learn more” when an ad appears on screen. And, interestingly, Ambient Experience ads appear to utilize Amazon’s AI image generator, which launched in beta last year. If an Ambient Experience ad looks strange or uncanny, it’s probably because the advertiser generated the background through Amazon’s Ad Console (instead of paying a graphic designer for an hour of work).
The good news is that Ambient Experience is only offered on a handful of Fire TV models, specifically the Fire TV Omni and the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. You can also disable Ambient Experience from the “Display and Sound” submenu of your Fire TV’s settings, though this is obviously a non-option for those who want to display a screensaver on their TV.
As for whether you can disable these ads without disabling Ambient Experience—that’s still unclear. Users can disable startup ads by turning off the “personalized ads” and “video and audio autoplay” settings, but we haven’t had an opportunity to test this with Ambient Experience ads yet.
Of course, Amazon isn’t the only brand that’s going ad-crazy. Rival smart TV platforms like Roku and Google TV Roku and Google are also finding new, “immersive,” frustrating ways to sell ad space. The only streaming device that’s mostly ad-free is the Apple TV 4K. I’m not a fan of the Apple TV 4K’s $130 price tag, but it’s my first recommendation when someone tells me that they’re unhappy with a Fire TV or Roku stick.
Ambient Experience ads should be rolling out to all customers with a compatible Fire TV device. Amazon hasn’t published a formal announcement for Ambient Experience ads, so the details are somewhat murky.
Source: Amazon via Cord Cutters News
