Roku’s New HDMI Tech Could Show Ads When You Pause Your Game
kotaku.com
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Just what we all wanted, even more ads to deal with in our everyday life

Ads ads and more ads. At this point, it seems everything is about ads. This is getting really annoying, really fast.

Always has been

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

LiveLM
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I guess this 2010 Sony I have is gonna have to last forever

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When it gets impossible to find tvs that stay out of your way, I’m going to become obsessed with crt monitors. Learning how to maintain them to keep them running literally forever seems like a more achievable goal than doing that same thing with normal unshittified flat-screen tvs.

4k projectors are a wondrous thing, as well.

So never buyba roku tv. Got it.

Unfortunately it will move everywhere.

Good thing the wifi card in my tv shit out so i just plugged in my ps4 and use the hdmi link to conteol the ps4 with the tv remote.

I’m guessing Roku wasn’t happy selling decent streaming sticks and a TV OS that more or less just works; they had to go down the enshittification path because Number Must Go Up.

Late-stage capitalism claims another victim, I guess.

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They were/are massively losing to Android, so they needed to find ways to compensate

Roku just announced they are going out of business the slow way.

They’ll “go bankrupt” then come back as a purely business to business company, licensing their shitty ad tech to other companies.

They announced that with the agree to arbitration or we’ll brick your device you paid for shit.

They surely have been making and oopsie after an oopsie …

If they weren’t already heading towards the bin, there’s no way they would seriously consider this. So, yeah. Enjoy your black screens where the ads “should” be in a few years when roku goes tits up.

Wouldn’t they need to forcibly ignore/remove HDCP for this to work? Isn’t that a DMCA violation?

A lot of games no longer have the traditional pause. Pause goes to the menu. Sometimes the settings menu, sometimes the character gear menu or similar. Throwing an ad over menu items you need to access would piss me off even more than ads already do.

Presumably they’d do it with some kind of idle timeout. No inputs for X number of minutes and you get an ad.

Probably rather X number of seconds, like 30, but yeah

And if it’s anything like their streaming boxes, pressing a button on the controller will select the ad instead of resuming your game. Happens too frequently that I’ll pause a show to eat or something, screensaver comes on and when I press a button on the remote it launches the roku channel instead of resuming the show I paused.

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Classic enshittification: extract values from both sides.

Consumers get a worse experience seeing unwanted ads
Advertisers pay for clicks that are erroneous
Roku’s numbers go up

It’s a shame there’s no easy way to flash custom OSes on smart TVs, in general. Even just nuking the whole thing to be a dumb display would be amazing.

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