Roku is exploring ways to show consumers ads on its TVs even when they are not using its streaming platform: The company has been looking into injecting ads into the video feeds of third-party devices connected to its TVs, according to a recent patent filing.
This way, when an owner of a Roku TV takes a short break from playing a game on their Xbox, or streaming something on an Apple TV device connected to the TV set, Roku would use that break to show ads. Roku engineers have even explored ways to figure out what the consumer is doing with their TV-connected device in order to display relevant advertising.
Imagine being the guy working on this and how much you hate yourself anytime somebody asks you what you are working on.
Even worse: Imagine being the guy working on this and being proud of yourself.
I think the former situation is worse for the person working on it.
Unfortunately, I bet these guys don’t care. I used to work at a company you might have products from and I would constantly hear “Hey, we’re a business” as an excuse to degrade the user experience. :(
I remember having an argument with my teacher in college about this. He asked us what we would do if we were asked to code something that could be used for things you personally don’t agree with such as the government using tools to “help” but also remove peoples privacy. Or corporations being able to show you more ads. I told him i would refuse. And he said that it would be my job though and sometimes you have to do things you don’t like. So i told him i would quit. And for some reason he could not really comprehend that and we got into an argument.
To be fair, most people I know don’t have the financial flexibility to quit their job if they’re asked by their boss to do something objectionable
“Yeah, I know it’s shitty, but it pays the bills 🤷🏻♂️”
We had to listen this C-level guy give a speech how good the last couple of years have been. We’ve increased the price of services by 50% and the amount of useless upsell shit we push to people has gone up as well. While our wages are still the same and people are getting laid off constantly. But I need food and shit.
Some people also have no qualms in doing the dirty job. They get paid and they don’t care.
The shittiest of enshitifications.
We need an anti-awards show for shit like this.
I like that. If there was a site that did like The Razzies for movies but for technology enshitification, I would definitely watch, and probably follow a blog if it was done well
The plungies. Winners receive golden plungers
Roku has always been a shitty company that wants to monetize everything. People are finally waking up. How many of us have a Roku remote that advertises a useless or bankrupt streaming service?
I know I’m old, but I miss having numbers on my remote.
Now I have a “sling” and a “crackle” button. 🙁
Yeah, I do miss being able to quickly type a code to jump to a known broadcaster. Opening up a menu is slower than jumping direct to said thing.
The Roku buttons solves that a little bit, but there is only 4, you can’t change them, and they prioritize featuring whoever pays up.
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
– Banksy
Didn’t Banksy sell out to corpos?
Not that I’m aware of. But secondly… it doesn’t matter if this quote is from a pure soul or a broken one - the we can gain value from its message either way.
How the fuck can an economy that’s almost nothing but advertisements sustain itself for any period of time? It feels like forcing more and more ads is the only thing anybody does for money anymore.
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
It’s got electrolytes!
Now I understand everyone’s shit’s emotional right now. But I’ve got a 3 point plan that’s going to fix EVERYTHING. …
Big economy, long time to fall. See example: rome or whatever.
They’re not even going to profit so much off the ads as they will having a new way to distribute them. Even then its, “line go up this quarter”, not “what if sales go down due to this?”. They’ll license it out to every offer company who needs it for line go up.
Wait until someone invents a bot/AI script that watches ads for you. Then the whole “ads everywhere” will either implode or it’ll trigger a war between AI ad makers and AI ad watchers
Either way, it’ll be entertaining.
They already have that it’s called click fraud or automated ad clicking, mostly though it’s websites that earned money from advertisers who engage in this, as a sleazy way of making more money.
Though if you want to partake in it there are ad blocking extensions that also do it. It’s not perfect but it is quite damaging to the advertising industry.
I’ve been using AdNauseam for several years already!
Interested in a 4 hour Adam Curtis documentary?
If Roku actually does this I would definitely never use them again. Completely asinine behavior. Especially because most people aren’t even using stand alone boxes with their smart TVs.
I would get rid of my old Roku that I’m sure is too old for this tech and urge everyone I know to never buy anything Roku, and if they did, I would lambast them every opportunity I could.
Our tv turned out to be a roku tv. When we bought it this wasn’t advertised well. Which feels on brand right now.
I will never buy a Roku device because of that forced arbitration stunt. We can add the fact that they are even considering this to the list of reasons.
Yeah, Roku must be on its last legs with the crap they’re pulling. All of this says to me: don’t buy Roku.
To be fair, a lot of companies are doing the forced arbitration nonsense. I just bailed on Vultr (VPS host) for doing the TOS update nonsense (undismissable pop-up, must accept to access account), and I’ve been looking for an alternative and every one I’ve checked has that forced arbitration nonsense in their TOS. Some let you opt out, but you need to send a letter or email to do so.
So instead of dealing with that, I’m actively looking for ways to avoid using any type of service with forced arbitration. I’m upgrading my NAS to support hosting my things, I’m trying to find VPNs that offer a fixed public address so I can expose services behind my NAT, etc. It’s incredibly frustrating because it’s literally everywhere now…
Don’t buy Roku TVs. Got it.
Imagine a world where talented engineers would put their minds to work for solving big problems instead of … I’m not sure wtf this is.
Increasing profit margins…which is the thing our society puts above all else.
This just goes to show how “engineering ethics” course requirements are extremely underrated (and how engineering ethics courses themselves don’t go far enough).
You underestimate how many talented people are in the world. I get that being on Lemmy for so long though lol.
It seems like so long that Roku was not a horrible company. Simple little box for a good price with a small static ad on the home screen to make money.
Seems like a lifetime ago.
I mean, there was always this bullshit.
My parent’s 10 year old Sharp TV has a Netflix button on the remote. That’s how long this has been going on.
Yeah, just saying Roku is has been the worst offender of this. Other manufacturers restricted these promotional buttons to streaming services that have large user bases. Roku sells those buttons to anyone who pays enough, and their remotes famously feature services that people don’t care about.
That little box even got a recent update that lets you ban certain ads by hitting *.
Is this why they made people waive their right to sue them?
Yeah… Fuck Roku.
No, no. The waiver was because they lost millions of people personal data to hackers and scammers. Entirely different fuckup.
This is gross. I cut my cable because of ads. Have about 3 types of adblockers on my computer to stop them. This hyper marketing is why so many have turned away from traditional entertainment to begin with.
I am more than the ability to spend money and it’s goddamn time everyone say this and boycott companies that do shady garbage like this
I have ubo, what are your other kinds of ad blocking? I always want to block as many ads as possible
I suspect they might be talking about a DNS based ad blocking solution. Like Pi-Hole or AdGaurd DNS.
They work by blocking DNS requests made by ads so the content can never be accessed. They’re theoretically more powerful than browser extensions as they have the opportunity to block ads anywhere.
While we have one (Pi-hole) I can’t use it right now because some of my roommate’s work software won’t run with it and we haven’t had time to troubleshoot. So I have a bunch of extensions in my browser on my pc
You could configure the DNS only on devices that don’t have issues with it rather than the network as a whole?
That, and you can also decide what (if anything) gets blocked on a per MAC/IP/FQDN basis, so you can explicitly allow ads for specific devices.
Adblock plus, flashblock, ublock, and one that stops videos from autoplaying but i can’t remember it’s name right now.
My roommate has raspberry pi but it messes with his’s wife’s work software so we never have it active. Which is a shame because i’d rather use that.
Oh, and Brave browser on my phone. It’s lovely.
The Pihole has groups that you can separate devices with and remove blocks for those devices.
So you can have your stuff fully blocked and then her device can have the problematic blocks removed.
A piece of history
Never connect your smart TV to the internet. Just don’t do it. Get a third party device or ideally use an old PC with an appropriate HTPC Linux distro or something.
Wait, why? Is the TV spying on me any more than my phone, every app I use, my desktop OS, every website I visit, all of my smart home devices, my car, my bank, traffic cameras, and my bottom left molar?
Can’t I just slap a PiHole on my home network and pretend I’ve done something about it?
TVs have a history of listening and collecting a lot more data than a smart device.
With a TV device like an android or Linux box, you can prevent that as well as ad-injection because you can install whatever you want on the device and it’s not as locked down as a TV. You can even disable or physically remove recording devices if you’d like, and many smart boxes do not even come with them.
Also, a pihole does not guarantee you filtered out everything or prevented the TV from interfering with your experience.
A TV can also change its policy on the fly and suddenly start injecting ads. Many TVs do this to add additional income after your purchase.
If tv is talking home using ip directly, DNS blocking will not work. You have to ether disconnect tv from your network or give the tv a static ip and block all traffic to and from WAN (internet) from that device Update tv manually using USB stick.
Reply to old reply, sorry. Technically blocking the IP isn’t perfect either. In theory, as long as it has the wifi credentials, and your wifi has access to the internet, your TV will be able to access the internet if it really wants to. All it’d have to do is ignore the IP assignment or fake/change a MAC address during DHCP. I don’t know why a “legit” TV would do this, but if you get some unbranded Chinese thing, or if any wifi device wants to be malicious, it can bypass DHCP+IP filters very easily.
Everyone expects a phone Nobody thinks about tvs
Get a signage TV instead of a smart TV. Then you also don’t have to deal with the slow ass UI.
I use Arch btw
Great, so Smart TVs won’t even function as basic displays anymore.
I swear I’m like going backwards with tech, I found an old ipod to use at the gym, I’m pirating shows, and I don’t bother with blu tooth keyboards and mice for work.
Tech didn’t get better or hassle free. Getting a haircut needs an “app” ffs.
What’s wrong with the wireless keyboards and mice?
I can’t explain it, a high tech wireless mouse glitches out on me in a year, and keyboard had phantom typos, I was just done with all of it I’m on a wired mouse and keyboard for 3 years and no problems
I also don’t use wireless mouse or keyboard. For me, it’s mostly about having confidence that it will work - and that if it doesn’t work then there are fewer points of failure to think about.
For example, if my keyboard isn’t responding… that could be because the computer has frozen and become unresponsive, or the keyboard is broken. That’s about it. But with a wireless keyboard I have to consider that the keyboard itself might be working but the wifi is not. Perhaps the keyboard’s radios are damaged or turned off; perhaps the battery is flat; perhaps the computer’s radios are turned off, or the drivers have failed; or perhaps some device is interfering with the signal. … I find that these thoughts just fill my head with crap that I don’t want to think about or worry about. In particular, I’m sick of dealing with batteries. The cable doesn’t bother me, so that’s a better solution.
I remember one time I was using a wireless device, and it seemed to work fine except when I was sitting at a particular desk. I spent ages trying to work out what was going on before finally working out that my computer monitor was blocking the signal. Adjusting the position of the monitor, or the device, or the thing it was talking to fixed the problem. Changing the wavelength also fixed the problem. … Wired just doesn’t have any of those variables.
I haven’t had problems with my wireless mice but headsets seem to get worse the more money I spend (never above $200, granted).
so glad i never bought into roku
and i never fucking will
good riddance.
This is how you get people to start rooting their TVs
I’d love that becoming a thing. TV OSs are always so shitty, I bet dedicated open source work would do wonders
