There are many good reasons to buy an Apple TV 4K, even if you already have a smart TV with built-in streaming apps. However, Roku has just added another one to the list: invasive advertising.
Since it’s an Apple product, the Apple TV is, unsurprisingly, known for delivering a private viewing experience. Apple certainly isn’t tracking what you’re watching outside of its own TV app, and third-party apps won’t be allowed to do this either unless you give them permission. Sure, Netflix and Disney+ certainly know what you’re watching on their services, but they have no way of finding out your viewing habits elsewhere. In short, what you watch on Netflix stays on Netflix.
Apple isn’t big on throwing ads in your face. While the iPhone maker once dabbled in providing advertising services to third-party apps, nowadays, you won’t see any ads on your devices or in Apple’s first-party apps outside of the App Store — and the ones you see there are directly relevant to apps not household products, appliances, and shoes.
Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to avoid the temptation of using your big-screen TV for ads. Amazon has been doing it for a while with its Fire TV devices, albeit mostly to promote Prime video shows, and now it looks like Roku is getting into the game, too.
As reported by The Verge and Cord Cutters, Roku’s CEO, Anthony Wood, told investors last week that it plans to expand its “Marquee” box to show video ads right on the device’s home screen. While it’s not entirely clear what part of the screen Wood is talking about, it’s likely the box that already sits above your Roku app icons that currently shows a static image ad.
Hopefully, this means that Roku isn’t (yet) going to take over your entire screen with these ads, although with the direction they’re going we wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the next step. After all, Wood also told investors that the company is “testing other types of video ad units” and “looking at other experiences we can add to the home screen that would be where we can innovate more video advertising.”
The new ad strategy seems to be arriving in tandem with new “AI-driven” personalized content recommendations. That sounds like it has the potential to get even creepier, although there’s no indication that the two will be directly related.
Roku isn’t the first to do this, and it’s far from alone. Amazon has begun showing full-screen video ads on Fire TV devices as a form of screensaver, and it seems that YouTube’s irritating new screensavers could be paving the way for ads instead of just static images from recommended videos.
In YouTube’s case, these screensavers pervade even its Apple TV app, but in a perfect example of Apple’s tight control over its ecosystem, you can override these with a shorter screensaver delay or simply avoid leaving YouTube running. Apps don’t get to play around with your screen after you exit them.
However, some of Roku’s recent thinking is enough to make its ad implementation even scarier. Earlier this month, Janko Roettgers of Lowpass unearthed a patent that would allow the company to show ads on Roku-enabled TVs whenever you pause content on any HDMI port — even one that your Apple TV, Xbox, or Blu-ray player is plugged into. This could even go so far as to use automatic content recognition (ACR) to analyze what you’re playing through that HDMI port so that it can serve you relevant ads.
Many TV sets already use ACR for marketing purposes — it’s one of the other reasons to get an Apple TV and keep your smart TV entirely off the internet — but it’s usually happening behind the scenes. Technically, you agree to this kind of content monitoring when you set up your TV, but manufacturers make it pretty easy to miss and count on your doing so when you’re hurrying through the setup screens for your shiny new TV.
Roku’s HDMI and ACR moves are merely outlined in a patent at this point, so there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever come to fruition. Nevertheless, it’s a bit disturbing that the company is even thinking in this direction, and it may be enough to give you pause about purchasing a TV that has any Roku features at all.
Thankfully, Apple is the one company in this game that hasn’t been bitten by the advertising bug. The Apple TV 4K is more expensive, but that’s because you’re paying the full price for the hardware upfront rather than subsidizing it by having ads shoved in your face while contributing your viewing habits to the data-hungry marketing monsters that live behind the scenes.