A new patent was recently filed by the TV and streaming device manufacturer Year hints at a possible future in which televisions could show advertisements when you pause a movie or game.
For Roku, the time when the TV is on but users are doing nothing is valuable. The company has started renting out advertising space popular Roku City screensaver– which appears when your TV is idle – to companies like McDonald’s and movies like Barbie. As a tech newsletter Low pass points out that Roku finds this idle time and its screen saver so valuable that it bans app developers prevent the screen saver from being overwritten by your own. However, if you connect an Xbox or DVD player to a Roku TV’s HDMI port, you’ll bypass the company’s screen saver and other advertisements. And so Roku found a way to prevent this.
As reported by Low pass on April 4th, Roku recently filed a patent for technology that would allow advertising to be inserted into third-party content – like an Xbox game or a Netflix movie – over an HDMI connection. The patent describes a situation where you are playing a video game and press pause to check your phone or grab something to eat. At this point, Roku will detect that you have paused the content and will display a relevant ad until you pause the game again.
How Roku’s HDMI advertising technology works, according to patent
Roku’s technology isn’t designed to randomly show ads while you’re playing a game or watching a movie. The company knows this would go too far and upset people. Instead, the patent suggests several ways Roku could detect when your TV has paused, such as comparing frames to ensure the user has done so Strictly speaking has paused the content. Roku could also use the HDMI’s audio feed to look for longer moments of silence. The company also suggests using HDMI CEC – a protocol designed to improve how devices communicate – to figure out when you pause and unpause content.
Similarly, Roku’s patent explains that it will use various methods to detect what people are playing or watching and attempt to display relevant advertising. So if it detects that you have an Xbox connected, it may try to serve you ads that it thinks would be of interest to an Xbox owner.
If this all sounds terrible and dystopian – a future in which we can’t even pause our old offline DVD movies without seeing ads for something – remember that Roku hasn’t moved forward with these plans yet. Your Roku TV will not display ads for Disney+ on your Roku TV call of Duty Pause screen tonight.
But considering Roku lost over $40 million in 2023 After making hardware sales and $1.6 billion from ads and services that same year, it looks like this HDMI ad injection patent could one day become a reality. If someone buys a cheap Roku TV and never uses the apps, only using it to play on Xbox or PS5, Roku is effectively losing money on that sale. This patent would make it possible to get even more money out of everyone.
And because Companies are addicted to “numbers go up”Well, I’m inclined to bet that at some point Roku and others will do whatever it takes to make these numbers keep getting bigger, consequences be damned. These companies will shove more and more advertising onto your screen, making it harder to enjoy the actual content you want to see, even though it might ruin your experience.
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