Roku has patented a way to ensure I will never own one of their devices, and I'll do my best to ensure no family or friends do either.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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I e already begun. At least 5 people around me will never buy Roku again. Fortunately, they're tech smart, so it was easy to explain and didn't actually require convincing.
I replaced all of mine with Nvidia shield and Walmart onn streaming pucks. It's a better experience in every way (once projectivy is installed) and costs less too.
Is there a lot of dev going on for the Walmart pieces?
You know, this a good thing. Now nobody else can do it, so I just need to never buy a Roku.
I remember the first time I learned about patent licensing….
☹️
Remember when Netflix started showing ads on a paid plan, and everybody was saying they'll quit.
"Haha! Look how Netflix will be thrown into the hole with Blockbuster, so nobody will follow."
So, where are we today? Everybody starts doing it, and Netflix is better than it was then.
Yeah, you'll have to forgive me for not being so sure Roku will eat too much shit over this, and that more companies will not follow.
I see Samsung's boner from here.
I fully do not expect Roku to face any consequences except more sales, sadly.
I think it's because people (some) are all talk. We bitch about corporate greed and stuff like this, but when it comes down to it, when you need a new electronic device and one's half the cost, which one do people buy?
The one with ads and that's made by slave wage third world workers, or the one that's twice as expensive?
As a whole, we tend to be garbage and materialistic...
I won't be buying Roku either.
Yes, that’s what I’ve learned.
Everything is just about lowest cost and least effort.
Like Twitter, nobody I knew left, despite it being free to do so. Same for Facebook, Reddit, WhatsApp, etc. Each scandal nobody seems to do anything.
I expected people to so watching ad supported Netflix, but it has seen huge growth and is their highest profit source.
I’m disappointed because I know I’m going to get ads everywhere no matter what now, and it’s on every electronic device, which need “secure boot” and whatever else so you can’t circumvent the ads. .
As a whole, we tend to be garbage and materialistic…
This might be one way to see it. I think a lot of people WANT to resist, but resistance costs a lot of mental and sometimes tangible energy. If you can smooth out a lifestyle that naturally excludes stupid brands like Roku, great.
But there's a point when you want to participate in the rest of society, and people will break down for that. I do my best to avoid walmart, amazon, and other abusive tech companies, and educate others to do the same.
But someone still gifted my mom-in-law one of those stupid "alexa" spheres that I immediately put on its own V-LAN, and the family wanted a TV so they brought home a TCL/Roku because it's what they could afford. (It was a good value at the time, years ago.) PiHole showed me exactly why it was so cheap.
Companies know after all the stresses you already encounter in your adult life, you're gonna run out of bandwidth and cave eventually, because you're human, and the path of least resistance becomes more tantalizing. That's why they bombard you relentlessly, and evil tech is the most immediately accessible and familiar.
Agreed.
Roku just invented a way for me to never ever give them any of my money.
Roku is really just trying to sabotage their reputation at this point, it seems.
Roku was such an easy recommendation for a long time... Non-complex UI, long support for updates, not owned by google or amazon... Far cheaper than LG and Samsung... (Not that Samsung's UI is anywhere near as easy as roku)
But now I guess thats done. Unless an alternate firmware exists or this doesn't hit older TVs I guess I'll be looking for a new TV... Which is a shame because my current 4 year old roku TV is more than capable.
This is burying the lead. It's not just about showing ads. It is tracking everything you on your TV, whether or not it a roku service
Lmao they already do that. That's not new. They've been snooping on your signals for a while. My parent's TV sometimes shows a pop-up after watching certain things on antenna/satellite
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So they break HDMI compliance in other words.
I wonder if it can be detected by the streaming apps. Some of them are really anal about ensuring you can’t record or whatever, and don’t work if it doesn’t get all the HDMI security stuff just right. I’ve had issues with bad cables and my portable projector(Anker) has to side load an alt version of Netflix because they couldn’t/wouldn’t get the device to pass Netflix “certification”.
I’m guessing this means new partnerships and money changing hands, or nobody on a Roku can watch Netflix anymore, or they put these ads at a higher level that bypasses whatever security/DRM Netflix uses. Probably the last one, but if Netflix thinks they will lost money to this they’ll probably just pull their certification anyway.
I wonder if it can be detected by the streaming apps. Some of them are really anal about ensuring you can’t record or whatever, and don’t work if it doesn’t get all the HDMI security stuff just right.
If I'm understanding what Roku has done, this has nothing to do with HDMI (HDCP) security. Roku is inserting the ads after the signals has left the HDMI subsystem, and before an image is displayed on the screen. They can do this because the Roku is inside the TV.
No Roku products. Gotcha.
How about no?
This is like really horrific but if I'm being honest, it's not going to happen. I think LG did a patent where you had to shout the brand being displayed on ads to skip an ad— and they never did that. This is probably a good thing so that other companies can't use it for a few hundred years
There's a big difference though. Making people yell is not the same as an ad being shown similar to a screen saver. Hard to believe but most people will just not care and those who do won't care enough to do much about it. There's a reason ads have become to main stream and normal they're yielding results the companies want.
A great example of how the mass majority of people not caring is look at the reaction to password sharing. Sure many people made a stink yet every single on of the platforms saw growth.
It was Sony, which really surprised me. This definitely sounds like an LG thing.
This is just another really good reason to never buy a Roku TV.
So, any recs. on good dumb tvs?
I'm upgrading to a projector soon, but also would love a few screens with actual buttons on the device incase of the inevitable remote loss.
I'm personally thinking of just plugging a decently capable little media PC into the display, using KDE's "big screen" interface with KDE Connect as a remote. I'm pretty sure I could train my family on that...
Roku is so scummy.
This is my thought:
Good enough laptops are about $200, and Linux is free.
Then there are fairly good projectors for like $80 or less that have hdmi, av, rgb, etc. with an led bulb.
So, grand total about $300 for a massive screen and zero ads.
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"dumb TV" is really just a commercial display. Usually the image isn't as good as a consumer display unless you really want to spend some money. For a decent display that won't wreck your bank account take a look at NEC displays. I have some in the field that are over 10 years old and used daily. Some even have compute modules you can add if you want your PC built into the display.
All I found in a cursory search were commercial displays. But I'll keep looking.
I've got a 30"? VISIO that's over 13 years old and doing just fine. I'd love to get another something of that quality; planned obsolescence sucks.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Now, the company is apparently experimenting with ways to show ads over top of even more of the things you plug into your TV.
A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices.
This theoretical Roku TV's internal hardware would be capable of taking the original source video feed, rendering an ad, and then combining the two into a single displayed image.
Among the business risks disclosed on Roku's financial filings from its 2023 fiscal year (PDF), the company says that its "future growth depends on the acceptance and growth of streaming TV advertising and advertising platforms."
If implemented as described, this system both gives Roku another place to put ads, and gives the company another source of user data that can be used to encourage advertisers to spend on its platforms.
It seems as though a Roku TV that was capable of this kind of ad insertion would need more sophisticated internal hardware than most current sets currently come with—this is the same company that feuded with Google a few years back because it didn't want to pay for more-expensive chips that could decode Google's AV1 video codec.
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I'm really hoping they patent this and lock it away so no one can do it...
I ain't holding my breath though
Man, am I happy that I stopped using my Roku and switched to an Nvidia Shield TV. I'm also happy that I have a "dumb TV"!
Isn't there a Black Mirror episode of this
1 step closer to "Drink Verification Can" becoming a reality
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