- #HOW TO GET PAID GAMES FOR FREE ON NVIDIA SHIELD UPDATE#
- #HOW TO GET PAID GAMES FOR FREE ON NVIDIA SHIELD ANDROID#
- #HOW TO GET PAID GAMES FOR FREE ON NVIDIA SHIELD TV#
So far I have seen ads for streaming services like Discover+, Disney+, HBO Max, IMDB TV, Pluto TV, and Starz. “It’s pure Darth Vader,” says Cory Doctorow, an author and longtime digital rights activist, who has written extensively about issues such as digital rights management, the right to repair, and the abuse of monopoly power.
#HOW TO GET PAID GAMES FOR FREE ON NVIDIA SHIELD TV#
It’s only with digital products like the Shield TV that manufacturers unilaterally change user interfaces and basic functionality on products that are already paid for and sitting in people’s homes. If you buy shelves at Lowe’s, no guy shows up a year later to paint Black+Decker ads on them. KitchenAid doesn’t sneak into your kitchen and shorten the power cord on a food processor you’ve been using. To be fair, the company never marketed the Shield TV as an ad-free device-but digital rights advocates frequently point out that nondigital products don’t get altered without their owners’ permission, regardless of their marketing messages. Nvidia is best known for its high-end graphics cards, which are used in powerful gaming PCs. In another instance, Google bought the company that made the Revolv smart home platform, then bricked the devices remotely. In one well-known example of that phenomenon, the owners of HP printers woke up one day several years ago to find that the company had disabled the third-party printer ink cartridges many of them had been using.
#HOW TO GET PAID GAMES FOR FREE ON NVIDIA SHIELD UPDATE#
Still, the software update touches on a growing question for consumers, Mahoney says: Do you fully own the digital products you buy, or can the manufacturers change the products later, adding or deleting features without your permission?
#HOW TO GET PAID GAMES FOR FREE ON NVIDIA SHIELD ANDROID#
“I really don’t want to see Miley Cyrus’s head every time I turn my TV on.”Īn Nvidia spokesperson says that it is monitoring feedback like Wallace’s, and encourages people to leave additional feedback on its official Shield TV forum and the official Android TV community page. I didn’t pay to be advertised to for things I don’t even care for,” said Nicholas Wallace, a Shield TV owner I met through Reddit. The several Shield TV owners I spoke with expressed frustration and anger. Hundreds of unhappy comments were being posted on social media platforms such as Reddit, with some users showing the 1-star ratings for the Android TV software they had left on the Google Play app store, a tactic called “review bombing.”
Once the ads started appearing, I quickly went online to see what other Shield TV owners were saying about the change. If you scroll up using your remote control to select an ad, it expands to take up almost the entire screen. (The space now occupied by ads was previously blank.) There are several ads that automatically loop. The ads appear on the Shield TV’s home screen and take up roughly the top half of the screen. I own an Nvidia Shield TV and noticed the ads, which promote various streaming services, like Pluto TV and HBO Max, in late June, which is when they first started to appear.
“This is a frustrating bait-and-switch, especially for consumers who bought the product expecting to have an ad-free experience,” says Maureen Mahoney, senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports. The Shield TV was known for its ad-free user interface, a premium experience that attracted consumers despite the availability of other streaming devices for a fraction of the price from companies such as Amazon and Roku, whose own streaming media devices have long had ads in their user interfaces.īut then a mandatory software update got many Shield owners fuming over the intrusion of advertising onto those home screens. Until recently, it had another selling point, as well. The device is powered by Google’s Android TV, a version of the popular smartphone operating system optimized for televisions. It lets consumers stream content to their TV from services such as Disney+, Netflix, and Spotify play games using apps like RetroArch, Dolphin, and Nvidia’s own GeForce Now and watch live TV using HDHomeRun and Tablo. The Nvidia Shield TV debuted in 2015 for $199 and is the top-rated streaming media player in our ratings.
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