Roku patent invents a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV (opens in new tab)

Roku makes me so sad. They had a product I really enjoyed using and admired them for making. Then slowly over the years they keep becoming more intrusive with their ads and more invasive with their data/privacy practices. My first Roku didn't need any sort of account, you just plugged it in and went. Now you have to register an account and I'm sure they are tracking everything I watch. They blanket the home screen with ads and I'm convinced they have programmed their remote to enable the microphone when I press pause/play every rand(20) < 1 just to remind me I can talk to my remote. Just waiting for the day it's revealed the mics on the remotes are always hot and feeding into their advertising models.

Been theorizing something similar (but in reverse), the purpose being to mute the TV when ad breaks occur (I watched too much football (American) last season and the ads are just the worst). The system would be trained to recognize the bumpers, score graphics, and lack of announcer voices to enable mute, then reverse the same to unmute. Obviously this is all much easier said than done, but every time I see that "I got you a puppy and you got me a truck!" ad it gets fleshed out further.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39936016

So glad to hear that one company has secured exclusive rights to this technology, ensuring that no other company can do this to us. (Of course, Roku could license this technology to other companies, but that licensing fee would make it marginally less profitable for companies to do advertise in this way.)

This seems like the kind of product that could cause a certain type of customer to render the device inoperative by some subtle means for the protection of other customers and then return it as defective.

Why stop there? Require all users to agree to a chip implant that injects ads into users’ consciousness.

I’ve personally experienced something like this as I use a 43 inch Roku TV as a display. I initially connected it to the wifi to see the features available, but factory reset it after I got a popup type image displayed when it was plugged in as a monitor for my PC.

"Invent" is a strong word here. Patented, sure

I guess it’s good we already have the word enshittification. It’s sad to see where we are headed. :(

...anything you plug into your Roku TV.