Featured Image Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor via Getty
Who'd have thought that in 2026, you could have the whole of Hollywood in your literal hands? A bit like when mobile phones evolved from those colossal beasts that included massive external battery packs, or how PCs evolved into laptops, our television sets are no longer chunky appliances belching out radiation.
TV in general is a completely different landscape than it even was a decade ago, with the Golden Age of television giving way to the streaming wars.
It's harder than ever to decide whether we give our monthly subscriptions to Disney, Amazon, Netflix, or all the rest, although the latter is set to change things all over again with the impending Warner Bros. Discovery deal.
Netflix also changed the way we consume TV and movies as it pushed Blockbuster out of the market and saw physical media largely make way for streaming. Amazon is also onto a winner with its Fire Sticks, letting you take whole libraries on the move with you.
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While there have been some recent legal issues with those who've been using their Fire Sticks for piracy, changes to sideloading third-party apps, and complaints that users with older TVs are having to deal with the Fire TV blaster being discontinued, there's good news for some fans.
There's an apparently game-changing Fire Stick change that will make it feel like you're viewing things in a whole new way.
As reported by the Daily Echo, one simple change can reduce lag and hopefully get rid of those annoying buffering screens. While not always as bad as Apple's rainbow wheel of death, there are too many times when we're supposed to have a perfect signal, only to have the latest episode of Fallout grind to a halt.
The outlet explains how preview videos running on the home screen could be grinding your Fire Stick to a halt.
'Featured Content autoplay' sees these previews run before you press play, meaning they can compete for your bandwidth and impact your streams.
To change this, head to 'Settings' from 'Home' and then select 'Preferences' before 'Featured Content'.
Simply switch off 'Allow Video Autoplay' and 'Allow Audio Autoplay', leaving you with a much nippier Fire Stick.
If that doesn't work, you can perform a soft reboot by holding 'Select' and 'Play/Pause' at the same time
Like how Apple tells us to make sure our iPhones are updated with the latest software to keep things running smoothly, we're told to keep our Fire Sticks up to date.
There were also recent grumbles that Amazon started playing full-screen ads when booting up Fire Sticks, and although disabling autoplay won't completely stop them, at least it will turn these ads into a static instead of a video – which most seem to prefer.
