- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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Good way to kill their product…
Sadly they already have all the money
I can’t imagine anyone that would leave the device plugged in after the first ad comes up. Pretty much anyone using such a device would also know how to unplug them. They clearly have other uses for that screen, so it’s not a total loss to keep it unplugged till the user can switch to a different brand.Ah it’s a Roku TV entirely. Reminds me of the Samsung TV ads
Roku TV sets come with ads. Generally, these are restricted to Roku’s home and menu screens, its screensavers, and its first-party video channels, and once you start playing video, the only ads you’ll see are the ones from the service you’re streaming from. That said, Roku TVs have shown ads atop live TV before.
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 […]
tl;dr never buy anything Roku, ever again. Got it.
Roku has patented a way to ensure I don’t buy their junk.
Roku about to patent a way to make you buy their junk.
Just imagine they work out a deal with every consumer TV manufacturer to put this on everything.
I’ll just buy a giant monitor then, it’s better anyway.
If only they made 60"+ monitors, I’d do the same. But since those don’t really exist, the options are:
- prevent TV from accessing the Internet
- get a commercial grade monitor - more expensive
- projector - most seem to not have smart nonsense
- pihole - may or may not work
I’m going to try out the first, but allow certain accesses (Netflix and Disney+). If that works, I may not need to worry about the rest of the list.
Yeah… I’ve been evaluating moving to Plex or Jellyfin.
Kinda getting done with a lot of this smart stuff. The Monopolies are flexing and I don’t enjoy it.
Fwiw, this was also on HN yesterday. Never tried it myself, though:
Do it, it’s great. The NVidia Shield is a great client for it but is getting more and more adds on the homescreen. The are alternative loaders without the add you can put on it.
Just do it. I ripped our DVDs and put them on my NAS with minidlna configured, and I can now stream my stuff directly to my TV through the “Photos and Videos” app. My other TV has a Raspberry Pi running Kodi, so if my next TV doesn’t support dlna, I’ll just do that.
Screw all of these companies and their predatory practices.
Jeff Geerling discusses having done the same, in one of his videos.
You’ve got it the other way around. Roku sell their TVs at a loss. Buy one, use it as a dumb screen and help them go bankrupt faster.
*their tv
Nope! I had thought about trying out their 4k box, but nope.
So I guess fuck people who use static images as screensavers
I mean… Yes? I hate this idea and Roku will lose me as a customer over this, but yes they are specifically targeting screensavers. Idle time is ad time to these people.
I’ll be a customer for as long as they sell these fairly high quality displays at a loss. I get a 4k TV, they lose money because they aren’t recouping the cost of producing the TV via ads, it’s win/lose in the best possible way
So we just ordered a new tv and just want the universe to know that Roku wasn’t even considered and this shit is why.
I mean, yeah sure, but are the alternatives that much better in this respect? Which alternative non-ad-ridden, privacy-respecting smart tv would you recommend (or ended up buying)? Asking for my future tv choice…
Commercial displays are your best bet, although they can be quite expensive.
Will probably last longer too since they’re intended for 24/7 or at least 16/5 continuous runtime.
Samsung, but I’d rather report back when I see if it’s a mistake.
I intend to keep using my AppleTV and hope that’s the end of it. But the Samsung was a process of elimination of Roku and LG via shitty experience with the WebOS on the work TV. If Tizen doesn’t stay out of the way then I’ll start playing router games.
We have a HiSense Android TV (most are now Google TV, but they’re essentially the same). There are ads by default, but you can install a custom launcher with no ads, so the experience is much better.
I use Projectivity launcher and it looks nicer, has no ads, and it’s much faster and more responsive.
As soon as I figured out how to install a custom launcher, I researched how to disable ads similarly on our Roku TVs and discovered all of the secret menus that could have disabled them, except they no longer work.
So the Roku level of lockdown on their custom OS is much worse now versus an android-based OS.
While Google is hardly privacy-respecting and ad-free, I guess the fact it can be more easily customized is a plus, maybe I should consider it for the future. After all, that’s the same reason I stick with Android.
Can GoogleTV be rooted like android can, preferably without resorting to hacks, like in some android phones where the bootloader is unlockable?
Can GoogleTV be rooted like android can, preferably without resorting to hacks, like in some android phones where the bootloader is unlockable?
Not that I’ve found, although over at XDA forums they seem to be working on it. I unlock and root my Android phones, but I doubt any TV manufacturer has even considered making their bootloaders unlockable so it’s an uphill battle.
Aight. So it’s time for me to start taking this seriously. Has anyone tried using like a GrapheneOS or LineageOS as a Roku or FireTV replacement? Is there anything like that which will support an experience with a regular remote control and have apps like Netflix and Hulu work?
Kodi. But it’s a mess compared to roku.
Hopefully this will enlarge the user base of kodi
Kodi is not suitable for the average user. Some streaming apps like Disney+ require a full chromeOS download just for extracting the DRM part. Roku instead offers for a few bucks a ready-to-go system.
I always wonder why some products just simply have all these DRM features and others don’t. Is DRM just a monopol for the chosen ones?
It’s exactly a monopoly for the chosen ones, gate keeping at its worst. Anything that isn’t blessed is going to be a bit more effort to get working, but I wouldn’t say Kodi is unsuitable for the average user on the grounds of the widevine module though, the DRM module extraction is automated when installing a plugin that requires it.
The problem with those TV apps is DRM. All the major streaming services require that you either use a locked down platform (probably checking SafetyNet and more on Android TV) or settle for their browser UI which lacks dpad support and gets quality throttled to 1080p or lower.
Circumventing that DRM is possible, but no project at the scale of a platform like those would dare the both legal risk and support headache of making those circumventions (which are very liable to break) a core part of the OS.
Kodi (and distros using it like LibreELEC) exist for people who want a FOSS platform for using non DRM encumbered media with a TV remote interface.
Maybe not the solution you were asking for, but the Nvidia Shield on the stock code has been a fair compromise for me. The ads on the main screen are relatively unobtrusive, and sometimes even vaguely relevant to our viewing preferences. We largely watch Hulu, Prime and YouTube+ (with free access to AppleTV and Netflix, but I haven’t set those up yet). For ads, we pretty much only deal with Amazon’s new advertising in included Prime content. We’ll probably stop viewing that content once the series we’re currently watching wraps.
For context, my daily driver phone is LineageOS which is rooted all to heck to smack down intrusive advertising and tracking (Magisk, AdAway, AppManager to disable in-app trackers, uBlock on the browser, etc…), and my home network uses a pihole for DNS and malware blocking. I really hate advertisers.
On the pihole, the Shield is actually only the #3 top offender of blocked requests, behind my wife’s work laptop and my kid’s Steam rig. The main offender on the Shield was the ESPN app, which I removed because I never really watch sports outside of tye idd division game, which most of the time I meet friends out at the local pub anyway. Otherwise the Shield has been a well behaved appliance.
So it’s not the perfect ad-free experience, but its hardly the advertising dystopia of broadcast TV.
I’d use a used laptop/desktop on Linux, e.g. something like steamOS, and then use jellyfin to stream stuff to this laptop. The media i watch is pirated, because it is more convenient and better quality than if I stream it through streaming service, even tho I pay for “4k” on these services.
But this displays over HDMI, correct?
Oh, I have read it wrong, upsii, yea it’s over HDMI Well, I guess Roku TV owner have to hope that there comes a way to flash a custom rom on that TV, indeed. But unlocking a bootloader and to find/make drivers for all that proprietary hardware seems like a hard job to me…
Actually you may have had the correct interpretation, they said as a Roku TV replacement. I read it as a way to fix their existing Roku TV.
you could install Android on a raspberry pi with a usb remote.
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!
Hopefully this ends up something they never actually do like that sony patent for ads that only go away if you call out the name of the product.
Sony fabitch!
Thankfully they patented it, hopefully deterring anyone else from also doing it
lol as if they couldn’t license it
Time to go back to books, fellas. This party is done.
Amazon/Audible walks in.
“Guess what industry I just exploited the shit out of!”
My TV set is like a dumb monitor: HDMI in, colorful image out, basta.
Not even audio. And of course it does not get any internet connection. And I don’t feed it any caviar.
TIL what ‘basta’ means.
Enough, stop. TIL.
Lmao@the people who think you’re telling the person you replied to to stop
(Ngl was me before I looked it up)
😂
avoid integrated smart technology, buy a separate box preferably Foss or with possibility to load a custom rom/os
It will be interesting to see how the technology fares with something like pi-hole.
