Roku looks into serving you ads on whatever you plug into its TVs | Hacker News Reader

Roku looks into serving you ads on whatever you plug into its TVs

engadget.com

36 pointsCharlesW59 comments

In the 90's my econ teacher said that in the future the difference between the rich and the poor will be the amount of ads the see. I thought he attributed it to Ray Bradbury, but I may be mistaken.

He's wrong.

The rich see just as many ads, because their eyeballs/attention is worth way more, so companies are far more incentivised to show them ads,

Thats why most companies are shying away from 'pay to see no ads' business models. The very people who pay are your biggest earners from the most valuable ads with the highest conversion values.

But there are much less of those people. I'm not convinced by what you're saying

In free to play games a big chunk of the money comes from a small minority of people. I assume ads follow a similar distribution.

But not necessarily high or low income.

I think you're confusing rich and upper middle class

I don't think this is the case. One of my younger brothers is in a way lower income bracket and only streams things via free services like Tubi. I tried watching a few things on that service - couldn't stand how many ads there were/are. Likewise, I pay for YouTube premium or whatever instead of dealing with ads, and used to subscribe to Spotify to avoid the ads, etc.

Now that streaming has overtaken cable, the need to be ad-free to lure users over is gone. Streaming is the preferred way to consume content, so now they're free to inflict ads on people because they don't think users are going to go backwards. And as each streaming service adopts ads, it lowers the barrier for others.

Plus the streamers are in need of more revenue and ads are just too attractive and easy to turn to.

But lower income folks are always going to see more ads. More billboards in their neighborhoods, more ads via radio, streaming, TV, whatever.

By having their eyes (or person) hold more value, it's more cost-effective to try to extract their value through personalized connections. Less ads, more human connections.

Absolutely false.

I pay a pretty penny to not see ads. My daughters don’t either. Social discussion on school reveals they miss a LOT of ads.

Maybe not accounting for pirated setups :)

It's more about basic vs premium aka "pay more for better quality/service" divide. Even a simple stuff as food got divided: you can have your cheap prepacked cold cut filled with soy protein, artificial aromas or you can pay more for a real ham.

It is pretty hard for the rich to opt out of smart TVs.

It's really not. Commercial display TVs without smart features are expensive, but easily affordable to the affluent.

That would be impossible, as the fact they're even considering it means their hardware will never enter my house.

This line of exploration puts Roku in my category of companies I'll never feasibly do business with, even if they change their mind. "We didn't actually put glass in your cheeseburger. We were just exploring our options!"

Samsung and other TVs already show ads on the Home Screen so this is just the other market players catching up.

Dumb TVs are also getting more expensive since Samsung and other TV manufacturers are subsidizing their cost by pitching the ads they can push down the line as they boil the frog.

What's a home screen? Is that the thing that displays for a couple of seconds until the Apple TV kicks in?

(Asking only half sarcastically. None of my own TVs never ever been anything but a dumb display for a settop box.)

Samsung Tizen TVs have this bar on the bottom when you go to input or try to choose a streaming app. Right next to my apps, there is a small box promoting Samsung TV Plus shows.

Neat. Glad I opted out of their binding arbitration. If they apply this as an update to the TV I bought two years ago, I'll be demanding a full refund and taking them to small claims court if they refuse.

Is it worth it? Roku has shown you their intentions. Believe them. Sell it now, and buy a TV from a company that makes money by selling TVs.

Yes, but Roku has metastasized: be sure not to buy a TV with bundled Roku either.

As of this moment, I'm not aware of a TV on the market that connects to the Internet on its own without using the owner's Wi-Fi or Ethernet. To my knowledge, none of my TVs are online in any way whatsoever.

I'd vastly rather use an Apple TV (or Android equivalent or PS5 or XBox or whatever) than some TV's junky built-in apps anyway.

You underestimate the evil that is Roku. I did too.

I thought I just wouldn't connect my Roku-enabled TV to the internet and it would be fine. Turns out that it starts bootlooping after a few months if you don't let it download ads. Can't return it at that point, so you call support... who helps you connect it to the internet. Boot loop goes away, ads download, fine whatever you'll just disconnect it after the call, right? But then after a while it starts bootlooping again, until you let it download ads. Amazingly sinister.

> Can't return it at that point

The hell I can't. Most major credit cards include extended warranties that let you return defective items for a year or so after purchase. A TV that can't be used as a TV without purchasing additional 3rd-party services (i.e. Internet access), and that doesn't make that clear at the time of purchase, is defective. I'd let Roku make their case to American Express.

I'm completely serious here. That's defective. I've never seen a TV with "requires Internet access" on the box. There are many millions of households that'd still prefer to watch free OTA broadcasts and have no interest in subscribing to an Internet service. My own mom has no Internet access beyond her iPhone. If her TV stopped working unless she bought it an unnecessary online account, she'd be back in the store raising hell until someone gave her a refund.

My card ended their extended warranty program about a year before I bought the TV. But yes, agreed, this makes it defective.

> buy a TV from a company that makes money by selling TVs.

These pretty much don't exist at the consumer level at all anymore. Two years ago, when I purchased this TV, I searched pretty extensively for consumer level TVs that meet your description.

I found none.

The only option was to move up to commercial market stuff, that is much more expensive, and designed to be on nearly all the time. Seriously, if you have a recommendation for a consumer TV company that makes money by selling TVs, I'm all ears.

I believe them, but I'm also not going to put this TV on some other poor (probably unsuspecting) consumer. No, the TV has become defective, through a deliberate manufacturer's choice, and I'll demand my money back.

There's a difference between "smart" TVs and TVs that make money from advertising, though.

There really isn't anymore. I'm not the parent, but I have also been passively searching for a new TV and have come to the same conclusion, which is why I haven't rushed out to buy one since my current one (without WiFi) still works. If you know of any brand or model that doesn't collect your data and participate in some form of advertising, I'm all ears!

As an aside: The other problem with smart TVs is that, even if the TV doesn't currently show you ads, it's one update away from doing so. A friend of mine had that happen with his TV (don't remember which brand), where it had a clean UI when he first bought it and now the home screen is littered with ads.

> Seriously, if you have a recommendation for a consumer TV company that makes money by selling TVs, I'm all ears.

Can't wait for their tech to "detect a still picture" in a slow, somber scene in a movie and shove ads down the throat of whoever will be the unlucky soul that day

Going to patent that now.. aww damn already taken :(

The other year I bought a TV with Roku that bootlooped whenever it couldn't download screensaver ads for more than a month.

Roku is evil.

Between this, and their binding arbitration debacle a while back, I will never use their products. Had a Roku back when they were first released (and before they became awful as a company) but haven't used it in years. No interest in giving assent to corruption and corporate overreach.

I used to like Roku but if practices like this get implemented, I’m done.

Why wait? They've played their hand. We know what they intend now.

Can't speak for OP but - I already own several Roku devices. I'm not going to run out and buy new stuff right this second just because Roku is going down this path. When I do need to buy new devices, though, they won't be from Roku.

This article finally got me to purchase an Apple TV, because it reminded of the terrible banner ads they added to the fire tv

Its hard to imagine how anyone thought this was a good idea. It will piss customers off, but will bring in almost no add revenue. Why would anyone pay to show an add when the user is most likely getting a sammich?

Big company patent filings aren't any indication they're actually working on it; engineers get paid for not-insane patents that get filed, and normally get a pat on the back during promotions; so you can't actually tell if it's just an idea an eng had over coffee or something evil they're really working on.

That day will be the day my Roku goes in the trash. I wonder how well they researched the potential blow back.

Onto the blacklist you go.. I mean if it wasn't on it already to begin with because of the mere idea of hardware based ads.

I'm not sure how they plan on surviving as a hardware maker. Who is going to buy this crap?

I will never buy a device with Roku on it again. And even when I did, I used it as a dumb monitor which had no access to the Internet. Now I have an LG OLED TV and even that has no access to the internet.

[dupe]

More discussion on the patent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39936016

Not a dupe. This is a different article.

It's the same story. HDMI ads patent. The discussion is over there.

What is the best "streaming appliance" option on the market today wrt ads and general privacy?

I pulled an Apple TV out of the trash and I really enjoy it.

I would have never paid for one, having used games consoles for streaming before it. But now that I've got it, I would find it difficult to go back.

The VLC app plays my entire media collection off my NAS without any config. None of the apps I've installed have had ads.

I'm sure a cheaper setup would work, like a mini-htpc running linux, but then my wife wouldn't be able to use it.

That's what I use on my TVs, and the TVs themselves never have access to the internet. The only ads I see on AppleTV are from whatever service I'm using...if I paid for an ad-supported tier. I don't.

I might be wrong but I think Apple TV is more or less the only device left that approaches that criteria.

I realize that there's no solution that is fully private and ad-free. At the minimum, you're still getting the ads from the streaming providers themselves, and you're being tracked by them. I'm just trying to figure out which one of the hardware options are the least privacy-invasive on top of all that.

Apple TV. No ads.

The FAST (free ad-supported TV) offerings built into most TV's work great in terms of privacy. It's a broadcast based system, so there's no tracking or monitoring of anything, you just see the same ads everyone else sees that are vaguely related to whatever you were watching.

Personally, I prefer having the regular breaks every so often to allow you to get up, interact with your fellow humans, feel alive, etc. I detest the "whoops there goes 6 hours of my life with back to back to back netflix" that some people seem to covet.

That said, often times the ad slots don't even get filled, so instead of ads you go to a 2 minute break where they play some background music and show a video of fish swimming around or something.

I have a noname Chinese projector and a chromecast. I don't pay for ad supported TV. The projector itself also takes a usb stick. Sometimes I plug in a laptop if my friend wants to use his Disney account.

If you haven't tried in a while, things like Plex, Jellyfin, etc, are now pretty close to a store bought experience. And there are vendors with pretty turnkey setups to pull content now, less research and setup required.

I already have a Plex server with plenty of content, but that is not a solution to "I want to stream Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/..." (if there are specific things there that one desires). And then you still need something to plug the actual TV into to show it, which can also handle remotes etc.

Speaking of which, do you know of any quality turnkey hardware for the latter?

At this point I would pay good money for Apple to make a television.

Netlfix should just buy them now.

Actually, Netflix created Roku but later splitted to avoid conflicts with it's clients.

Gross

It's time to goto war with Roku and their penny grasping scumbag management.

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