Amazon won't release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore

When Amazon introduced adverts, I Cancelled. Went from near $1k a year on Amazon as a whole to nearly zero.

I still pay for Netflix, Disney, Apple, Spotify and bbc. I’m happy to pay for my entertainment, I refuse adverts.

When Clarkson farm came back I looked at re subscribing to Amazon, there were three choices, all with adverts.

I’m sure it makes money, but for me you get greedy and you lose money.

Most of my life I was strongly opposed to piracy for moral reasons. Now I... intentionally try to own (download/pirate) content I consume and I also do this for ideological reasons. So yeah, this effect is real.

On top of that, as long as big companies don't take the protection of my personal information seriously, why should I worry about violations of copyright laws? It works both ways.

Almost worse? Cable doesn't have unskippable commercials, we've had the DVR since 1999. In 1999 it was still possible for a new tech product to be user friendly.

Streaming was designed from the ground up to be user hostile with surveillance and reduced control over the video stream. People hold onto old specious ideas and don't update them.

Best investment I made this year was an old refurbished PC to use as a home server. Having my personal streaming services is actually pretty amazing.

There was a point in time, around 10-12 years ago, that I thought that piracy would eventually die, as the streaming services were pretty cheap and offered good quality/quantity. How wrong I was.

But it is refreshing to be sailing the high seas after such a long time. Brings back memories. Contrary to paid services, piracy actually got much better and convenient. Better quality audio/video, etc

That’s because Walmart is also selling Android piracy site streaming boxes. So boomers/technologically out of the loop think it’s legitimate.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/S6-Elite-Ultra-2024-SuperBox-TV-2...

"Basically the main reason"?

I can count among my friends and family some 50 Fire Sticks, and we're all happy with them, as they do what they say on the box. We Tech folks (and some more than others) live in a bubble, but the other 99% of the users couldn't care less about this.

Don't worry, I'm sure they'll find a way to blame the EU for this too.

How so?

Everything is a platform play.

I think it's grossly unethical and negligent that our DOJ/FTC allowed them to acquire film studios, subsidize them with outside business unit profit, put ads across their own properties, then give it all away for "free". This destroys actual healthy industries.

They bought Lord of the Rings for egregious sums, emblazoned ads on all of their delivery vans, printed it on their packaging, and put it front and center on all their apps. Any other studio would be out a billion dollars on that. Then Amazon just gives it away.

How do you compete with that?

Meanwhile Warner Bros has to fight an uphill battle to reach the same eyeballs, spend a fortune on production and advertising, and then ask customers for their money. Why would they go to theaters when they can get it for free on Prime later? Or just watch one of the shows already on Prime?

And of course now Amazon has offshored the jobs, further put consolidation pressure on the industry, gobbled up more studios...

Every single one of these giants needs to be broken up. They are a cancer in search of more growth, and unfortunately in order to find that growth they are killing the host (healthy American industries and jobs).

How could you not know the argument that Apple has normalized selling devices that forbid the ability to run arbitrary code without their permission?

You're not required to agree that that's a bad thing, but how could you be unaware of the reasoning at a high level?

GPL-3 dependencies are typically banned inside embedded device firmware. If a 3rd-party app uses those presumably it will be problem for the developer of the app, not Amazon.

> How does this work when apps use GPLv3?

Android Open Source Project is mostly Apache licensed, it runs on the Linux kernel which is GPLv2.

This situation with the firesticks is essentially the same play that TiVo pulled way back when, and the GPLv3 is supposed to counter.

GPLv3 doesn't entitle you to signing keys or the ability to remove them: you can release, compile, and inspect the source which will ostensibly still be provided - but not practically use it on the hardware you purchased.

But Amazon has infinite money, so licences are meaningless.

Whoever ends up using these devices second hand will be in for a rude awakening, which is bad for that person (even if it means that it just ends up going to ewaste and they get nothing) and bad for the environment. It's also bad for anyone who orders one new and isn't aware of the changes, although I agree that that is less bad than with phones due to the fact that a pi largely mitigates it.

Yeah, but then you are not the target audience, watching Amazon Prime and Netflix on the Raspberry Pi.

Vega OS isn't Android, Amazon has moved away from it.

It is a Linux distro, and apps must be written in React Native (C++ libraries supported), or Web.

It’s to avoid making it easy for people to buy them put on plex or jellyfin clients and paying for access to pirate services.