System would detect paused content on external devices and show ads on top.

A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023 and it was published in November 2023, though it hasn’t yet been granted.

The technology described would detect whether content was paused in multiple ways—if the video being displayed is static, if there’s no audio being played, if a pause symbol is shown anywhere on screen, or if (on a TV with HDMI-CEC enabled) a pause signal has been received from some passthrough remote control. The system would analyze the paused image and use metadata “to identify one or more objects” in the video frame, transmit that identification information to a network, and receive and display a “relevant ad” over top of whatever the paused content is.

  • assembly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    3 months ago

    Aight. So it’s time for me to start taking this seriously. Has anyone tried using like a GrapheneOS or LineageOS as a Roku or FireTV replacement? Is there anything like that which will support an experience with a regular remote control and have apps like Netflix and Hulu work?

    • SolidGrue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      3 months ago

      Maybe not the solution you were asking for, but the Nvidia Shield on the stock code has been a fair compromise for me. The ads on the main screen are relatively unobtrusive, and sometimes even vaguely relevant to our viewing preferences. We largely watch Hulu, Prime and YouTube+ (with free access to AppleTV and Netflix, but I haven’t set those up yet). For ads, we pretty much only deal with Amazon’s new advertising in included Prime content. We’ll probably stop viewing that content once the series we’re currently watching wraps.

      For context, my daily driver phone is LineageOS which is rooted all to heck to smack down intrusive advertising and tracking (Magisk, AdAway, AppManager to disable in-app trackers, uBlock on the browser, etc…), and my home network uses a pihole for DNS and malware blocking. I really hate advertisers.

      On the pihole, the Shield is actually only the #3 top offender of blocked requests, behind my wife’s work laptop and my kid’s Steam rig. The main offender on the Shield was the ESPN app, which I removed because I never really watch sports outside of tye idd division game, which most of the time I meet friends out at the local pub anyway. Otherwise the Shield has been a well behaved appliance.

      So it’s not the perfect ad-free experience, but its hardly the advertising dystopia of broadcast TV.

    • Petter1@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      I’d use a used laptop/desktop on Linux, e.g. something like steamOS, and then use jellyfin to stream stuff to this laptop. The media i watch is pirated, because it is more convenient and better quality than if I stream it through streaming service, even tho I pay for “4k” on these services.