Roku Patent Sparks Outrage Over In-TV Ads
Roku Patent Sparks Outrage Over In-TV Ads, Roku TVs come with advertisements. These are generally limited to Roku’s home and menu screens, screensavers, and first-party video channels, and once you begin playing video, the only advertising you’ll see are those from the service you’re streaming from. However, Roku TVs have previously presented advertisements on top of live TV.
Now, it appears that the business is experimenting with ways to display advertisements across even more of the devices you plug into your television. Lowpass discovered a patent application from the company that specifies a method for showing advertisements on any HDMI-connected device, which may include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, and possibly other video streaming devices.
The described technology would detect whether content was paused in a variety of ways, including if the video being displayed is static, if no audio is playing, if a pause symbol appears anywhere on screen, or if a pause signal is received from a passthrough remote control (on an HDMI-CEC enabled television). The system would analyze the paused image and use metadata “to identify one or more objects” in the video frame, then communicate that identification information to a network and receive and show a “relevant ad” on top of the paused material.
The patent revolves around the idea of displaying advertisements on these TVs whenever they are tuned to an HDMI input that is paused or idle. In theory, this would allow Roku to show adverts across your whole TV experience, even locations where it is currently not possible. Your PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Apple TV, or Blu-ray player may become just another canvas for the firm to expand its already profitable advertising business, Roku Patent Sparks Outrage Over In-TV Ads.
According to the patent, the business would employ a variety of cues to detect when an HDMI output is paused; for example, the Roku TV may wait for extended audio silence or just analyze onscreen frames to identify when movement has stopped, among other techniques. The patent also mentions employing automatic content recognition (ACR) to determine what you’re watching on an Apple TV (or playing on a console) and display you with related adverts. Roku Patent Sparks Outrage Over In-TV Ads, ACR is not a new concept, and it is something that many of us agree on while fast going through the initial setup of a new television.
Obviously, it would be extremely easy for Roku to completely botch this up, disrupt your entertainment, and upset customers. And a patent does not guarantee that the concept of adverts on every HDMI input will become a reality. However, it follows a recent pattern of streaming box (and stick) manufacturers pushing right up against the line of what consumers are prepared to endure – and seeing if they can quietly change the goalposts. Microsoft is also experimenting with this.
A few months back, Amazon began automatically playing trailers on Fire TV devices at startup if the user did not take quick action. The move irritated a lot of individuals, but evidently not to the point where the corporation reversed the modification. You can disable autoplaying adverts in the settings, but you may still get full-screen picture banner slideshows.
I hope Roku doesn’t implement the ideas laid out in this patent covered by Lowpass. Roku TVs are often good! They’re dependable, get a long road of software updates, and feel instantly familiar to many people right out of the box. And I’m looking forward to checking out how a Roku Pro TV compares with today’s impressive Mini LED competition from TCL, Hisense, and more.
But I’m not certain that the firm will not continue to push us down this path of getting ads in front of eyeballs at whatever cost. Even if Roku does not, it appears like another TV brand will be inspired by this patent in the worst possible way.
This hypothetical Roku TV’s internal circuitry could take the original source video feed, produce an ad, and then combine the two into a single displayed image. According to the patent, combining these video streams could allow for both static and animated advertisements. Patents are only patents. Roku Patent Sparks Outrage Over In-TV Ads, A submitted and approved patent is not the same as a specific strategy for implementing the technology detailed in the patent. This capability could appear on future Roku TV sets exactly as promised, or we may never hear about it again. Everything from the cost of implementing the feature to the difficulties of having it work in real life as it does on paper, to user and partner criticism, might deter Roku from putting it into action.
But Roku The company is strongly motivated to find new ways to increase revenue from more ads on Roku devices. Among the business risks listed in Roku’s financial filings for the fiscal year 2023 (PDF), the firm states that its “future growth depends on the acceptance and growth of streaming TV advertising and advertising platforms.”
If implemented as stated, this approach gives Roku another area to insert adverts while also providing the firm with another source of user data that can be leveraged to entice advertisers to spend on its platform. Roku also expects that the broader shift toward ad-supported streaming tiers that we’ve seen in recent years would “shift… ad dollars from traditional TV to streaming,” (PDF), and that having additional areas to display advertising will put Roku in a better position to benefit on that change.
It’s unclear whether this type of feature may be activated on currently supported Roku TVs with a software update, or if a newer set with newer hardware is required. A Roku TV capable of this type of ad insertion appears to require more sophisticated internal hardware than most current sets currently include—this is the same company that feuded with Google a few years ago because it refused to pay for more expensive chips that could decode Google’s AV1 video codec.
