Technology

I never considered Roku and I'm glad.

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 offline.

That backlog of books and DVDs in my closet is more and more attractive each day.

There should be a special division in all patenting offices called Burning With Fire ™

avoid integrated smart technology, buy a separate box preferably Foss or with possibility to load a custom rom/os

Thankfully they patented it, hopefully deterring anyone else from also doing it

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.

Fuck Roku. If we stop buying their shit. They'll eventually be bankrupt to implement this feature. So Fuck roku

Thanks to OP for reinforcing my choice to forever avoid smart TV's.

Edit: if you want a non-smart TV look for hospitality TVs.

Also, "how to ask everyone capable to hack your shit product without asking everyone to hack your shit product."

It will be interesting to see how the technology fares with something like pi-hole.

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!

Anyone know what I should be running Plex on instead? I don't want to just hook my computer up to the TV. Rokus are like $10, so ideally around that price point lol