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Comment by greenbit | Hacker News Reader

When roku decided that Amazon was the rightful owner of my fastforward button about a year and a half ago, that nearly got it tossed, but since Netflix was still behaving, I still have my roku. But if (as I suspect) we're about to behold the power of this fully functional ad-server, it WILL go directly into the e-waste.

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> Amazon was the rightful owner of my fastforward button

What do you mean by this? The back button is involved in system UI and apps should be limited in their ability to steal it, but fast forward is an action that makes no sense outside the context of an app

Can't skip ahead to sections of their content you want to view and instead are forced to watch it in sequence.

Either that or can't skip ads, ala legal dvd playback

I'm still not seeing the part where this is Roku's fault at all. It's Amazon's app responding to the controls the way Amazon wants it.

There's no platform with a standardized "fast forward" experience - Apple TV, Google TV, Fire Sticks, whatever are apps running on a device and those apps all implement their own navigation controls.

Pretty sure the big A had a problem with older versions of the OS. I'll climb way out on a limb and guess that the API for the apps didn't support embedding control codes in the stream to disable various user controls at points of the content owner's choosing. So yes, the APV app is driving whether to try to force ads on you, buy they couldn't write the app to do that prior to some version of the roku os.

To be completely cynical about it, if APV hadn't demanded the os support, I think some other party probably would have.

Daily Roku user here. I'm not sure what you mean about Amazon and the fastforward button.

Apparently leading up to Amazon prime video inflicting ads where no ads had gone before, they put out a requirement to streaming device manufacturers that said devices needed to support the ability of the source to disable certain buttons. Couldn't have people fast-forwarding through the precious ads, now could they?

So when they just stop your show to try to sell insurance or whatever, and you try to ffwd through that noise, you get a little caption that informs you that "fast forward is not available during ads".

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