If you’re a Verizon customer and have an FIOS account, you may be seeing promotional widgets on your screen. These widgets are designed to promote services or products from Verizon. To disable these promotional widgets, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Verizon app and sign in to your account.
  2. Scroll down to the bottom of the main screen and click on “Settings.”
  3. In the “Settings” screen, click on “Widgets.”
  4. On the “Widgets” screen, select “Disable.”

Verizon FIOS has a lot of great features, but their set-top boxes have one obnoxious flaw: Whenever you haven’t used them in a while, they load annoying widget ads that take forever to load and require exiting out of. Here’s how to disable them.

We wouldn’t even have such a problem with it — we’re an ad-supported site, after all — but these ads can sometimes take a minute to load, and the set-top box locks up and won’t respond while trying to load the ads. They make using the box a serious pain.

It’s worth noting that if you have a Netflix subscription you can watch House of Cards without paying extra for it. And they’ve got season 3. So why would you pay for it from Verizon?

Disabling the FIOS Widget Ads

To disable the ads, assuming you didn’t hit the Options button when they showed up, just head into Settings using the settings button on your remote. Head to Notifications on the right-hand side.

Once there, go to Promotions.

And then you can switch the Promotions feature from Enable to Disable.

We’ve found that the entire box performs a lot better when it’s not trying to check for ads all the time.