Roku shows ads before you even get to the home screen

Roku is apparently experimenting with a particularly aggressive form of advertising: the manufacturer of streaming sticks and smart TV interfaces is playing an advertisement to some users before they even get to the home screen. In practice, this means that you have to watch an advertisement as soon as you switch on the TV – and before you can do anything else in the Roku interface.

The technology magazine Ars Technica has collected user reports on Reddit and in the community forums. There are different statements whether the commercial – often a trailer for the movie “Moana 2” – can be skipped. Some users write that the ad cannot be skipped, others have found a button to close the commercial. In a statement to heise online, Roku there is confirmed there is a button to close the ad. According to Roku, showing ads before the home screen is merely a test.

Advertising with HDMI players

Behind Roku's aggressive advertising strategy is an effort to keep device costs low to keep up in the competitive hardware market. The US company attracted attention last year with a patent application for a technology that also feeds advertisements into HDMI feeds.

This would allow televisions to display advertisements even when an external player is connected to a television via HDMI. Roku would use HDMI-CEC to find suitable slots for an advertising spot. This would allow Roku to recognize when a pause command is sent. Alternatively, the Roku technology could also analyze the video signal directly to detect a pause symbol, for example.

Roku also wants to display particularly targeted advertising: for example, an advertisement for a new console could be displayed if the user is using a slightly older console on the TV. So far, there are no known cases of Roku using such technology.

(dahe)