Roku patent invents a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV

Roku patent invents a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV(arstechnica.com)

21 points by alanpage 2 years ago | 30 comments

Roku makes me so sad. They had a product I really enjoyed using and admired them for making. Then slowly over the years they keep becoming more intrusive with their ads and more invasive with their data/privacy practices. My first Roku didn't need any sort of account, you just plugged it in and went. Now you have to register an account and I'm sure they are tracking everything I watch. They blanket the home screen with ads and I'm convinced they have programmed their remote to enable the microphone when I press pause/play every rand(20) < 1 just to remind me I can talk to my remote. Just waiting for the day it's revealed the mics on the remotes are always hot and feeding into their advertising models.

3abiton 2 years ago | |

So you just sit there and take it? I don't see why people allow this behavior and treatment from companies, especially when there is a shift in direction. If people kee buying, they will never stop selling.

kurts_mustache 2 years ago | | |

I know you are right, but there just aren't enough hours in the day to fight against every injustice or underhanded business tactic. Plus it takes a toll on my mental health to obsess about these things and I have to force myself not to do it. If there were a viable open source alternative that I could run, or better yet, a pre built version I could buy and plug into my TV then that's about the right level of righteous indignation I can muster for this particular case.

andsoitis 2 years ago | |

They had no recurring revenue and compete against Amazon and Google on hardware.

wmf 2 years ago | | |

Roku takes a cut from apps that you use.

RankingMember 2 years ago |

Been theorizing something similar (but in reverse), the purpose being to mute the TV when ad breaks occur (I watched too much football (American) last season and the ads are just the worst). The system would be trained to recognize the bumpers, score graphics, and lack of announcer voices to enable mute, then reverse the same to unmute. Obviously this is all much easier said than done, but every time I see that "I got you a puppy and you got me a truck!" ad it gets fleshed out further.

bb88 2 years ago | |

Black screen detection and audio cues are often used to detect commercials. With sports it should be even easier, since ads don't look like the field or court the athletes play on.

Personally I think it might also be easier to convert the audio to your own close captions in more real time and higher quality ( and better than what the broadcast typically gives you) and leave the sound on low. I like the crowd noise and the announcers, but I also like my sanity more.

gnicholas 2 years ago | |

Sometimes we get home when a game is already in progress, which allows us to fast-forward through ads until we’re synced up with the live game. It is nicer than having to play the mute/unmute game. As you said, sports commercials are pretty awful.

yummypaint 2 years ago | |

Smart TVs certainly have the hardware capability to do this already. Many already run content detection. It's purely a problem of will and software. I never understood why there is no open source smart TV firmware.

segfaltnh 2 years ago | |

I vaguely recall TiVO doing something like this in the 90s, and then pulling back the feature, probably because partnerships weren't as interesting when your product removed revenue...

COGlory 2 years ago |

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39936016

gnicholas 2 years ago |

So glad to hear that one company has secured exclusive rights to this technology, ensuring that no other company can do this to us. (Of course, Roku could license this technology to other companies, but that licensing fee would make it marginally less profitable for companies to do advertise in this way.)

AnthonyMouse 2 years ago | |

I wonder if there's actually a market for that.

Donate to a non-profit that hires dystopian fiction authors to patent the technology in their stories, wait 500ms for some jackass to try to implement the dystopia, sue them for damages and enjoin them from continuing to do it. Donate half the proceeds to the EFF and use the other half to file more dystopian patents.

gnicholas 2 years ago | | |

A philanthropic patent troll? Intriguing.

AnthonyMouse 2 years ago |

This seems like the kind of product that could cause a certain type of customer to render the device inoperative by some subtle means for the protection of other customers and then return it as defective.

tonetegeatinst 2 years ago | |

Agree. Whether that is a legal market or not is unknown to me and up to a court of law....but they are basically creating more jobs by forcing ads into everything.

bandyaboot 2 years ago |

Why stop there? Require all users to agree to a chip implant that injects ads into users’ consciousness.

kurts_mustache 2 years ago | |

I vaguely recall a news article about some company, I want to say Apple but I'm not sure, patenting a process to use the camera to track your eyes to verify you're actually watching an ad to make them truly unskippable.

supertimor 2 years ago | | |

MoviePass

potatoball 2 years ago |

I’ve personally experienced something like this as I use a 43 inch Roku TV as a display. I initially connected it to the wifi to see the features available, but factory reset it after I got a popup type image displayed when it was plugged in as a monitor for my PC.

jostmey 2 years ago |

"Invent" is a strong word here. Patented, sure

AgentOrange1234 2 years ago |

I guess it’s good we already have the word enshittification. It’s sad to see where we are headed. :(

tithe 2 years ago |

...anything you plug into your Roku TV.