Roku displays Faces of Death on home screen more prominently than PBS Kids | Hacker News Reader

Roku displays Faces of Death on home screen more prominently than PBS Kids

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1 pointcirrus34 comments

To be clear, I don't care about what channels Roku provides or what content those channels have. Users are in control of what channels they add and that is fine.

The troubling part is that ads for un-added channels and their content is displayed prominently and automatically on the home screen without the ability to filter. Oh, and this isn't even a third-party channel, it is the Roku-owned The Roku Channel.

I understand that most of HN is probably not going to care and spend time posting some version of "so what?".

I also understand that the content of Faces of Death is dated and somewhat debunked as faked. That isn't the point.

I also understand that Roku is ad-supported, and that I have the option to use them or not, or the option to take steps to block ads. Also not the point.

Roku's official response is:

> Please be advised that Roku (and/or its partners and content providers) may display advertising and promotional messages through your Roku products and content services. And, All Roku devices are Ads supported, most Ads are managed by each channel developer. Unfortunately, we don't have an option to remove ads at this time. We'll be sure to share your feedback with the team though. Let us know if you have any other questions.

Any remotely modern R rated movie is more realistic and graphic than Faces of Death, do you have issues with ads for those movies? Many PG-13 movies are worse and newpapers, magazines and TV news regularly show far worse. Faces of Death is largely viewed as comedy these days and some of the "graphic" imagery in it was humorously bad/fake even by 1980s standards.

You jumped right into that "spend time posting some version of "so what?"", didn't you?

The only remotely graphic things in it are related to animals being killed and nature shows on PBS are more graphic, especially when you consider the terrible video quality of Faces of Death. I watched Faces of Death when I was around 9 in the late 80s, we spent most of the time laughing about how bad and fake it was, it was not even good enough to fool 9 year olds in the 80s. The only actual human deaths they shown are taken from broadcast news footage where you don't actually see anything and the only reason you know someone died is because they tell you, things like police shooting at a house.

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