Roku

Roku is toying with placing ads over your TV’s HDMI input

Ben Schoon | Apr 5 2024 - 8:42 am PT

Roku is looking to monetize your TV in a new way, as the company is toying with the idea of placing ads over what’s coming in from an HDMI input.

Modern smart TVs are very often sold for minimal, if any profit, with the idea being to generate further income over time with advertising. But, for many of these TVs, avoiding the built-in OS and using an HDMI device can ruin that profit.

Roku, it seems, has found a potential solution.

In a patent first uncovered by Lowpass, Roku is playing around with the idea of placing ads over an HDMI input.

The company’s patent describes the idea of identifying when content coming through an HDMI input is paused and placing an ad at that point. Roku can’t actually “talk” to the device plugged in over HDMI, at least not to the extent possible to do this, so this requires monitoring the video and audio feed to get the timing right.

Top comment by Scott Womack

Liked by 66 people

And that will be the day I get rid of my Roku TV!

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The patent further describes ways of scraping metadata and using content recognition to make ads shown relevant to the game, movie, or show the person is watching through the HDMI-connected device.

It’s an interesting, somewhat worrying idea for the future of smart TVs, but there’s also no guarantee this will happen. This is, for now, just a patent. There’s no evidence Roku has actually worked out how to do this, or built out a way to implement it on TVs. However, given the company has also explored other forms of “idle” advertising such as placing ads on the screensaver, it only seems like a matter of time before this actually happens.

Plus, this sort of functionality technically already exists to an extent. For several years now, Roku TVs have been able to overlay “more ways to watch” on top of HDMI inputs.