If you have an Amazon Fire TV, you may have noticed an annoying new development: when you turn it on, instead of the usual home screen, it plays a full-screen ad

Initially, I thought I may have accidentally pressed the wrong button when turning the TV on However, this turned out to be a feature, not a bug

Last week, a new update rolled out to all post-2016 Fire TVs, introducing a full-screen video ad that plays automatically upon startup; as first reported by Cord Cutter News, this update changes the default position of the Fire TV cursor to to place it above the banner ads at the top of the home menu

You can quickly exit the ads by pressing the Home button or pressing down on the cursor to bring up the Home screen; The Verge also notes that there is no real fix for this yet, but there is a workaround available from the Settings menu: from the Settings menu, go to "Preferences Settings, then Featured Content, and toggle the "Allow videos to autoplay" option off Banner ads will appear on the home screen, but will be static images instead

The update began rolling out to Fire TV users late last week and will slowly roll out to more Fire TVs in the coming weeks and monthsIn a statement to CordCuttersNews, Amazon said:

"Our focus is to provide an immersive experience that allows customers to not only enjoy their favorite TV shows and movies, but to browse and discover more content they want to watch We are constantly working to make the Fire TV experience better for our customers and have updated one of the prominent places in the UI to play a short content preview if the customer does not take any other action when turning on the Fire TV"

Of course, Amazon is not alone in this Pop-up ads are nothing new, and other smart TV operating systems like Google TV and Android TV also display full-screen video ads, but with one important difference: users usually have to hover over these ads to get them to start playing The fact that Fire TV now automatically starts these video ads without any input from the user feels quite disruptive