Roku is exploring ways to show consumers ads on its TVs even when they are not using its streaming platform: The company has been looking into injecting ads into the video feeds of third-party devices connected to its TVs, according to a recent patent filing.
This way, when an owner of a Roku TV takes a short break from playing a game on their Xbox, or streaming something on an Apple TV device connected to the TV set, Roku would use that break to show ads. Roku engineers have even explored ways to figure out what the consumer is doing with their TV-connected device in order to display relevant advertising.
i think the tv boxes are a great middle ground, like my mi box s gen1 was shipped with clean Android TV image straight from google without any bloatware…
it’s basically as “bad” as any android phone (aka privacy is opt in, but it’s not as bad as e.g. lg with their data collection, and it does not show any intrusive ads, since it’s a clean Android build (app sidebar shows suggested apps from google play, but it’s an android thing))
(they started adding bloatware like their own spyware launcher and replaced android tv dashboard with crappy ad-filled google tv one starting with android 9 update on gen1 or all gen2 software revisions though…)