Thanks for letting me know to never buy a Roku. Someone should tar and feather the executive who came up with this idea. Fucking hell.

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In a better world, this patent could perhaps be used to prevent other companies from using this method.

I’m honestly surprised it took this long for someone to try this. With smart devices I would think it would just take enough RAM to store the last few seconds of frames and do a comparison.

Like, if less than 5% of the image changed in the last three seconds and there’s been no new caption lines recieved (for broadcast content), pop a banner ad in at the bottom. Like how TV stations used to advertise upcoming specials and events over top of the bottom of other shows.

Additionally/alternatively: Require streaming apps to broadcast a clear “paused” status back up to the OS, or just track use of the pause/play button.

There’s a whole bunch of different ways a smart device could attempt to identify pauses in content, and a whole bunch of companies who would be willing to mess up on the identification and piss off consumers for the chance to push ads and make more money.

What’s going to be interesting is how streaming services and cable/sattelite providers react to this. I’d imagine that they would consider overlaying ads they don’t control onto their content to be a violation of their rights to advertise to the consumer and control their own content. Also means corporations making content would have less control over what ads are shown with their content, and ads would have less control over the content they are shown with.

“This Liveleak flaying torture video brought to you by Gillette razors!”

That’s great of them to advertise it; now we can avoid buying anything Roku makes!