Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

I had a Roku. Replaced it with a second hand Apple TV after software updates stuck ads all over the menu.

Pretty shit thing to do to paying customers, and one of the main reasons I’m so hesitant about IoT gizmos in general. Might start out great, but the provider can turn it to shit at a moment’s notice with no recourse.

And it looks like this continues to get worse since I bailed: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20902423/roku-tv-interact...

They made a “more ways to watch” feature to automatically find when content is available on a streaming service, and then two years later gunked it up with advertising that you can’t disable short of turning off the feature entirely. Cool.

Makes you wonder if the real reason they built that feature in the first place was as an excuse to monitor everything you watch and monetize that data.

> Makes you wonder if the real reason they built that feature in the first place was as an excuse to monitor everything you watch and monetize that data.

It is. Roku has a lot of competitors (google, Amazon, all sorts of cheap mfrs) yet you seen their device in the impulse buy displays by the cash registers in Safeway. They aren’t making money on the sale of the device, it’s on the ads and more importantly the info stream.

Investors want to see a recurring revenue stream. Almost all hardware you'll eventually be able to "buy" will have some sort of avenue for recurring revenue stream. I recall reading something about the people who made LynQ (portable GPS thing) and investors wanted to know how they intended to keep getting money out of the people who bought it.

The future is going to suck.

Probably best to buy hardware from privately owned companies then if your worried about this kind of thing. I don't mind paying an extra premium for hardware if it means I wont be bombarded by ads or be spied on.

There's not a single ad on my Roku, other than ad supported content.

Really? I had a giant banner on the home screen. Right side, taking up about 1/3 of the TV.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com