A screensaver with a bizarre and charming cityscape, the city of roku involves millions of idol televisions every day. Recently, the island paradise has appeared in photos. In the foreground, Floating Billboard invited me to subscribe to Disney+ and watch Moana 2 Press the button on my remote. Convenience, I don't mind about the new era supported by advertising. A eavesdropping, I will.
The ads are clearly not new on television. As far as we watch the show in the sparkling box, we've seen commercials that provide the economic engine for the entire entertainment factory to run. The streaming platform provided several years of reprieve by charging a monthly fee for commercial content, but it is now virtually impossible to watch TV without watching any kind of marketing. What's happening further under the radar is that your TV is collecting data about you and your viewing habits – sometimes by directly monitoring what's on your screen – providing personalized ads on your TV and elsewhere.
The screen you once loved for private, uninterrupted Netflix watching has become a big sign that will even spy on you.
This isn't just a problem, but when some users recently had to watch video ads, the company was in hot water. Moana 2 Trailer – Before you access the TV home screen at all. Roku says this is just a test, but the fact that it resembles a feature that Amazon deployed over a year ago is unfolding in Prime Video. This suggests that ads are generally becoming more brave on streaming platforms. How you feel about it depends heavily on your way of thinking and feelings about privacy.
The television business traditionally contained three different entities. There's the hardware, that is, the TV itself. Entertainment like movies and shows. And the ads are usually only commercials that suspend movies and shows. In the streaming age, tech companies want to control all three. This is a setup also known as vertical integration. For example, if Roku creates a TV, serves content, and sells ads, you'll control the experience, set rates, and earn the most money. It's business!
roku does this very well. Founded in 2002, Roku entered the market in 2008 after Netflix invested $6 million in the company to create a set-top box that allowed televisions to stream Netflix content. It was literally called a Netflix player by Roku. Over the next 15 years, Roku will grow its hardware business to include streaming sticks, essentially a small set-top box. Wireless soundbar, speakers and subwoofers. It also has its own affordable roku brand smart TV after licensed its operating system to a third-party TV manufacturer.
Most people think of Roku as a hardware company, but in reality it became an advertising company almost ten years ago. In the early days, you may see banner ads on your home screen or have tiles telling you to watch game of thrones I'm going to HBO. However, after launching a more serious advertising business in 2016, Roku began selling targeted ads in 2017 on the Roku Channel, a free, ad-supported television (high-speed) service across devices.
Your TV collects data about you and your viewing habits – sometimes by directly monitoring what's on your screen – providing you with personalized ads on your TV and other locations.
Things really rose when Roku began acquiring advertising companies in 2021, including Nielsen's Advanced Video Advertising Business. This allowed Roku to gain new insights from its audience to better target ads and ultimately charge more money for those ads. At the end of 2024, Roku reported an annual advertising revenue of $3.5 billion. This accounts for 85% of total revenue, much higher than the hardware business. Roku also has 90 million users (millions more than Apple TV+). They became a gold mine for data, not just what they watch on TV, but also who they are and what they like. Today, it's better to think of Roku not only as an advertising company or someone who makes cheap TVs and streaming sticks, but also as a data company with millions of detailed profiles.
About Moana 2 The controversy stated that the company's growth is always necessary and always necessary to continue testing and innovation across design, navigation, content and top-notch advertising products. The statement also stated, “Our recent testing is just the latest example. It offers a fun and simple user experience while exploring new ways to showcase brands and programming.”
The shift to everything ad-supported is happening across the television landscape. People haven't bought many new TVs recently, so TV makers want to make money from the TVs they already sell. Samsung has Samsung Ads, LG has LG AD solutions, Vizio has Vizio Ads and more. High-tech companies, particularly Amazon and Google, not only create software and hardware for televisions, but also leverage the vast amount of data that users have to sell ads on television platforms. These companies also sell their data to advertisers and data brokers. It can also be used to train AI.
According to Laura Martin, an analyst at investment bank Needham & Company, Rok's first-party data wealth could become an Amazon or Google gold mine. “The Roku is the perfect size with a truly strategic fit,” Martin told me. She added that Roku's data could also benefit companies with AI ambitions, including Openai. “If I'm a large language model, this is the data I absolutely want to own.”
The streaming industry has faced calculations in recent years. After prioritizing years of growth over everything else, companies like Netflix and Disney finally had to start making money. As a result, these companies have led to more billing, service constraints and adopting cheaper ad support tiers.
For better or worse, advertising is just like the past, the future of the television business. “For consumers, it's definitely a complex ecosystem,” said Jon Giegengack, founder of Hub Entertainment Research. However, Giegengack argues that this ecosystem is ultimately superior to consumers. In reality, there are streaming options that work for your budget, and ads fill the gap.
But not everyone is excited to be hit by advertising and passively harvesting data. Also, more ads mean that you pay less attention to the content you want to watch, and these companies pay more attention to the ads you want to see.
Nevertheless, the trade-offs are valuable to many Americans. Around 43% of all US streaming subscriptions were supported by the end of last year, according to market data company Antenna. Even if you pay for the ad-free layer, you're contributing to the advertising ecosystem by abandoning data to the streaming platforms and even the companies that make TVs they use.
Is it possible to escape from advertising?
It's tough to be released from this advertising prison. Most TVs on the market today come with technology with built-in automatic content recognition (ACR). This is basically a TV Shazam. Shazam itself helps to spread the technology, providing smart TV platforms with the ability to monitor what you're watching by taking screenshots while you're watching or capturing audio snippets. (This occurs at signal level, not from actual microphone recordings from the TV.)
Advertisers and TV companies use ACR Tech to collect data about habits that are difficult to track, such as when watching live TV on an antenna. They use that data to build your profile to make your ads better. The ACR also works with devices such as gaming consoles, as it connects to the TV via an HDMI cable.
In a study of a paper published last year on how ACR Technology works, Yash Vekaria called HDMI spying on “the worst thing we've found.” And I must admit that I hadn't heard of the ACR until I came across Vekaria's research.
“They don't keep it a secret, but they don't have any realization about it,” Vekaria told me. “So if people don't know, they wouldn't doubt it.”
Watching streaming TV and avoiding ads altogether these days is extremely difficult. One, perhaps a surprising option? Your local library. The app called Kanopy taps collections of local libraries across the country and has plenty of great classics, documentaries and indie films. It's also free and ad-free. All you need is a library card.
Although ACR is popular on the platform, Roku is particularly excited about the technology. Many of the companies Roku acquired in recent years have been working on ACR, and the Roku-owned company won Emmy in 2023 for the technology work. Roku also states that the scale of the data collection function is “unparalleled” as its TV operating system market share is 40%.
Unfortunately, there are not many options when it comes to ACR on TV. When you first set up your TV and accepted its privacy policy, you probably enabled the technology. If you refuse this, many of the TV features will not work. You can also accept the policy and then disable ACR in your TV settings, but you may also disable certain features. In 2017, Vizio resolved a class action lawsuit to track users by default. If you want to turn off this tracking technology, here is a good guide to consumer reports explaining how to explain for most types of smart TVs.
To be honest, after learning about all of this over the past week or so, I've done nothing revolutionary. I can actually buy the idea that more relevant ads will provide a better experience. Since you don't have eczema, you don't need to watch ads for 12 different eczema treatments while watching YouTube TV. I have young children so I'm learning about new toys for young children. (Ads to kids, or even watching YouTube to your kids – is a completely different issue.) So I agree to all privacy policies and enjoy streaming content as the industry intended.
But as a rule, it bothers me that tech companies have to eavesdrop on their TVs to enjoy all the features of their devices.
If you're setting up an ad-free TV experience, your best bet is to buy an old stupid TV from eBay and not connect it to a Roku, Amazon, or Google device. You can purchase antennas for network televisions and DVD players for movies. Y2K's tendency to revive is worse than being completely offline in some valuable leisure time.
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