A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023 and it was published in November 2023, though it hasn’t yet been granted.
The technology described would detect whether content was paused in multiple ways—if the video being displayed is static, if there’s no audio being played, if a pause symbol is shown anywhere on screen, or if (on a TV with HDMI-CEC enabled) a pause signal has been received from some passthrough remote control. The system would analyze the paused image and use metadata “to identify one or more objects” in the video frame, transmit that identification information to a network, and receive and display a “relevant ad” over top of whatever the paused content is.
I don’t have to imagine roku injecting ads, I’ve already seen it. Had a movie going on my tablet, screen shared to the tv over wifi, tv screen had an ad “you can watch this movie on our bullshit streaming service!”. This was 2 years ago. I will never buy a smart tv. And fuck roku specifically.
I’ve just invented a way to never use a Roku product again, and I’ve chosen not to patent it.
The process is this:
- Don’t buy anything from Roku anymore.
Or anything with Roku embedded in it already.
I’m glad they patented it so that any of the products I actually buy won’t be able to do this
If it’s patented, it can also be hacked more easily.
It will be licensed to manufacturers with advertising incentives and packaged into consumer electronics.
Savvy electronics users will supply their own HDMI cables; this product will be for people who only understand enough to plug the ends between their box and the entertainment system.
Hell, you might even see these cables being handed out for “free”, akin to the AOL disc days.
Why?
I think they’re erroneously stating that there will be so much technical information in the patent that it will be trivial to reverse engineer and remove from Roku products.
Unfortunately that isn’t the case.
Parents can be licensed for use by other companies.
Autocorrect or comment on society?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Now, the company is apparently experimenting with ways to show ads over top of even more of the things you plug into your TV.
A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices.
This theoretical Roku TV’s internal hardware would be capable of taking the original source video feed, rendering an ad, and then combining the two into a single displayed image.
Among the business risks disclosed on Roku’s financial filings from its 2023 fiscal year (PDF), the company says that its “future growth depends on the acceptance and growth of streaming TV advertising and advertising platforms.”
If implemented as described, this system both gives Roku another place to put ads, and gives the company another source of user data that can be used to encourage advertisers to spend on its platforms.
It seems as though a Roku TV that was capable of this kind of ad insertion would need more sophisticated internal hardware than most current sets currently come with—this is the same company that feuded with Google a few years back because it didn’t want to pay for more-expensive chips that could decode Google’s AV1 video codec.
The original article contains 591 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
Imagine that you pay for an ad free streaming service through your roku, like HBO for example. And now you have ads streaming over it?
People will sue for a way to disable it over ad free paid content.
Also, this will lead to way more pirating. People are sick of advertisements.Even if people sue, doesn’t mean they have any legal grounds to win. What law is Roku breaking? You can’t sue your TV manufacturer for not being 4k when you pay for 4k content. Your content display technology has the right to display content how they see fit.
I see this as a job for the free market. As consumers we need to show Roku how we feel about that.
Lol, wake up man, the free market hasn’t been free for years now.
a job for the free market
Hey, as long as there is a way for ordinary people to attend shareholders meetings in person and have direct physical access to the humans who made these decisions, I’m sure everything will work out in the end.
Is that how you think the free market is supposed to work? People don’t get to decide how companies operate. They have every right to create a shitty product. As long as there’s room for competition to punish them for that bad decision.
The free free market requiring a cool hat and tropical bird.
If I purchase a TV, that I now own, and after I own it the company “updates” my TV that I now have to watch ads in order to use the TV I purchased without that condition?
At minimum it’s a breach of contract
Their recent ToS update: “We bricked your TV until you ‘consent’ to waiving your right to sue us if we do something illegal. Also, we won’t tell you what you’re consenting to up front, instead we’ll make you spend hours reading through pages and pages of legal garbage to find where we buried this statement.”
They know that nobody would agree to this if they put it in big bold letters right above the “agree” button, so they bury it behind hours of tedious reading so that people cave in and just “consent.”
If you roofy someone’s drink and pester them until they “consent” to sex, you would get thrown and jail and probably shanked in the liver. If Roku bricks the TV that you purchased and won’t let it work again until you consent to something that you’re nearly guaranteed to miss or not understand by design, their profits go up because people can’t sue them.
This capitalism hellhole can’t burn down fast enough.
The free market has failed dude. THIS IS THE RESULT of it!
Capitalism and our current implementation has many failings. A company making a really shitty anti-consumer decision when there are plenty of alternative competitors and options is not one of them.
Capitalism rewards the most ruthless pursuits of money. Without regulations monopolies, shit products, and the cheapest wages possible are the end results of it as those are the most efficient ways to get as much profit as possible. In the end, any company that doesnt participate in such tactics gets out competed
Capitalism, has a bunch of problems. Those are some of them. Frankly I think it’s due to collapse and I hope we’ll be better for it. But Roku? Monopoly? They’re a mediocre company making a possibility short sighted decision. This is capitalism working as intended. Don’t buy it if you don’t like it.
If you don’t like capitalism call out real problems, because this just sounds like you’ll take anything that looks bad and blame it on capitalism. Which weakens the overall argument against it, IMO.
Bud, you just agreed with me what the real problems are, yeah monopoly doesnt apply to Roku, but shit product DOES with this change. But all THREE are huge problems for “regulation FREE MARKETS” which is what I listed them in response to
Edit: Formatting
Ah, I think I misunderstood. My mistake. I would make the point that I think many consumers would actually prefer the cheap ad riddled version of many services. Like, many streaming services people complain about having ads, have an ad free tier they’re unwilling to pay for. But I assume you’d make the argument that’s from the poverty created by the other problems within capitalism. Which is a valid criticism.
Yes the free market always wins!
Let 'm pirate. Teach them how to do it better even.
That’ll be why they just pushed a “agree to our new license with arbitrage or your tv is a brick” update
People who don’t pirate already are fools.
Yarrr matey
That’s some scummy shit…
Everything owned will do this sooner or later.
owned
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
The amount of ewaste they will be producing when they push that update. Should be against some environmental laws.
Not what laws are for.
Is what guillotines are for.
Bread and circuses. They’re gouging us on the bread and making the circuses inaccessible, these dipshits are practically begging for a red terror, by making the worst outcome still better than the ongoing white.
Give me freedom from advertising or give me death.
Roku would gladly do the latter if they thought it profitable
Roku somehow thinking that the Ferengi rules of acquisition was a how-to guide book.
Can’t we put these devices in some kind of dev mode and install software to stop this shit?
I assume these devices run some kind of Linux kernel, with a stripped down Linux distro.
The problem there is proprietary hardware blobs, no one’s made open-source drivers for any of the myriad TV manufacturers, each with their own OS.
How do emby or jellyfin devs develop clients on roku?
I would think, if you have that level of access, you could also stop or patch whatever OS services they run.
Surely you can ssh into these devices right?
roku generally puts a lot of effort into security
“security” for themselves, not the customer, I guess
i’m trying to say that they’re pretty locked down
I’m tired boss…
Please don’t tell the idea to HP or they might get inspired.
I don’t understand why anyone uses one of these,when you can stream anything you want for free on your computer in your web browser.
Is this sarcasm, or do you genuinely not understand watching TV?
Anything you would watch on tv is available free on the internet. No subscriptions, even Netflix. I"m not being sarcastic. Hang your f’ing monitor on the wall, then. That’s all that makes this “tv” different. Well, and its advertisements.
I don’t know why anyone wants to connect their TV to the Internet…
To watch things? To stream music? Game streaming? To avoid the additional expense, cable clutter, and additional remotes of android TV boxes (which also contain ads out of the box anyway)?
Honestly what kind of question is this lol. It’s pretty obvious why people connect their TVs to the internet.
Use a media extender… they’re like $20.
Try finding a dumb tv for sale of relevant size and quality. I know you don’t have to connect it to wifi… Usually. But I just want a TV that doesn’t have all this shit in it to begin with.
O I’m not saying it’s easy. Just don’t connect it. I’ve got tvs with all that crap but they’re connected to my media extenders that I can control, vs a TV that for w/e fucking reason needs updates.
This is like Windows putting ads in the fucking startmenu…
More like Windows showing ads even when you boot Linux
More like your monitor showing you ads is while using Linux.
Please don’t give them ideas.
Is this real? I’ve never seen a native ad in windows and honestly don’t know if maybe it’s some kind of a regional thing.
On fresh installs before running the debloater scripts there’s plenty of Try Candy Crush and it’s already got Office 365 pinned and accidentally clicking that takes you to the store page, and there’s some other shit I can’t remember by name
There should be a special division in all patenting offices called Burning With Fire ™
I would assume that these ads still need an internet connection to play. Another great reason to use an external box to play your media and leave the smart TV online.
*offline!
The whole point of having a Roku tv, however is for it to be connected to the internet and it works between all of the apps and your phone.
We have a 10 year old Roku TV and it’s actually been pretty great that’s streaming.
Actually the whole point of having a Roku TV is that it’s cheap. Unlike many other TV Os’ people don’t necessarily buy Roku TV’s on purpose. Roku has just cornered the market on providing cheap smart OS’ to the cheapest of TV manufacturers. Chiefly TCL, which became incredibly popular as a surprisingly good value TVs in the last five years. I’d imagine they did so by providing the OS for next to nothing to these manufacturers, with the intention to steal as much end user data to sell off as humanly possible.
if they patent this, it could be slightly good thing because it might prevent other companies from doing it
Lmfao…
Hahahahahah
They’ll just license the tech to everyone.
still, others will have to pay for it which might reduce how widely its used.
Sometimes i wonder if it could be worth it to invent shit like this and patent it just so no one else cant do it themselves
Nah, they’ll patent it anyway and then tie you up in BS lawsuits over it. Fighting it will cost you way more than you’re willing to spend, so you’ll settle out of court for a licensing agreement that definitely doesn’t benefit you but makes the lawsuit go away.
LibreELEC FTW!
If your TV has native Roku on it, this wouldn’t help at all because you have to run Kodi through HDMI input to the TV anyway, right?
Yup, so don’t get a TV with Roku on it.
