AIBU to complain about a shark trailer auto-playing on our Fire Stick?

[SpiderIceCream]

We have an Amazon Fire stick. All the parental controls set up on it etc so the kids can't watch anything inappropriate. DS's are 6 and 8. For background my younger Ds has had a phobia of sharks for as long as I can remember. Don't know what triggered it but we cannot go to aquariums etc because of it.

This afternoon I let the kids put the telly on because I had some phone calls to make. As soon as it was switched on younger Ds comes running to me screaming his head off, crying and completely hysterical. When he eventually calmed down, he kept repeating that there was a shark on the TV eating people! 🙄

Upon checking the TV it turns out that Amazon Prime has put a trailer on the fire stick homepage for its latest series, which happens to involve a shark in some caves that bites people. Complete with associated screams etc as they get bitten. It was quite disturbing even for an adult audience imo. The video starts automatically when the fire stick is loaded (doesn't have to be clicked on etc) and there does not seem to be anyway to get rid of it or change it to a different advert. The only way to stop it once it's started is to click off it but unless Ds isn't in the room, it's a bit late by then 🙄

Wibu to complain to Amazon? Is there any age guidance on trailers etc that they have to follow?

This is a well known thing with the fire stick. Unfortunately. I don’t think Amazon care. Best bet is to go into settings and under preferences and featured content you can then turn off video and audio autoplay. That should, I think, stop trailers from automatically playing.

There are standards. Trailers must be the same rating as the media they are preceding, so you can't have an 18 rated trailer before a PG movie. But a shark movie isn't necessarily offensive and Amazing can't be expected to deal with every possible phobia.

It was on the TV. It didn't come in through the letterbox.

You walked out of the room and you were distracted. Take some some accountability. Next time switch off the television.

I don't have fire stick but assume when starting prime it works the same as app and you first pick which profile before movies etc load?
If they didn't pick kid's one and went onto standard, that's not really amazon's fault though

It’s the home screen of the fire TV when you first turn it on that shows these trailers. It’s not a profile within Prime video- that is launched from this home screen and it sounds like OP has the parental control settings for that sorted already. You turn the TV on and get these trailers playing before you even launch an app. But I think you can disable trailers altogether as per my PP. I looked into it after we also had something inappropriate playing then the trailer changed and I forgot. Might revisit tonight now OP has reminded me.