> Most likely ... sending the hash
I do suspect you're right since they would want to reduce bandwidth, especially since residential upload speeds are slow but this is pretty close to verifiable, right?
Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests? I can say Samsung TVs really don't like it... but they will be fine if you take them fully offline.
I admit, I've not gotten around to properly dumping that traffic. For anyone wanting to do this, there's also a spike of DNS requests every hour on the hour, even if tv is off(well, asleep). Would be interesting to see those too. Might be a fun NY holiday project right there. Even without decrypting (hopefully) encrypted traffic, it should be verifiable.
> Also just curious, what happens if you block those requests?
Due to `*.roku.com` DNS black hole, roku showed no ads but things like Netflix and YouTube using standard roku apps("channels") worked fine. I now moved on to playing content using nvidia shield and blocking outside traffic completely. Only odd thing is that the TV occasionally keeps blinking and complains about lack of network if I misclick and start something except HDMI input.