Roku has patented a way to display ads on anything you connect to your TV

Roku TVs come with ads. Generally, it's limited to Roku's home screens, menu screens, its own screensavers, and first-party video channels, and once you start playing a video, the only ads you'll see are ads from the service you're streaming from. However, Roku TVs have shown ads over live TV before.

Now, it looks like the company is experimenting with ways to show ads on top of more things you plug into your TV. a Patented from Spotted by Lowpass It describes a system for displaying ads on any device connected via HDMI, a list that can include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, personal computers, or even other video streaming devices. Roku applied for the patent in August 2023 and it was published in November 2023, although it has not yet been granted.

The technology described will detect if content has been paused in multiple ways — if the displayed video is static, if no sound is playing, if a pause icon appears anywhere on the screen, or if (on an HDMI-enabled TV) CEC) A pause signal was received from a jumper remote control. The system will analyze the paused image and use metadata to “identify one or more objects” in the video frame, transmit this metainformation to the network, and receive and display “relevant advertising” over the paused content.

The theoretical Roku TV's internal hardware would be able to capture the original video source, display an ad, and then combine the two into a single displayed image. Combining these video streams could enable static or animated advertising, according to the patent.

Patents are just patents. A filed and granted patent is not the same as a concrete plan to actually implement the technology described in the patent. We could see this feature coming to future Roku TVs exactly as described, or we may never hear about it again. Everything from the cost of implementing the feature, to the difficulty of making it work in real life the way it does on paper, to user and partner backlash could discourage Roku from putting this into practice.

But Roku is very excited to discover more ways to make more money with more ads on Roku devices. Among the business risks disclosed in Roku's financial filings from fiscal 2023 (PDF), the company says its “future growth depends on the acceptance and growth of advertising platforms and streaming TV advertising.”

If implemented as described, this system gives Roku another place to place ads, and gives the company another source of user data that it can use to encourage advertisers to spend on its platforms. Roku also expects that the general shift toward ad-supported streaming levels seen in the past two years will “shift…ad dollars from traditional TV to streaming,” (PDF) And having more places to place ads will put Roku in a better position to capitalize on this shift.

It's unclear whether this type of feature can be enabled on currently supported Roku TVs with a software update, or whether it will require a newer set with newer hardware. It seemed as if a Roku TV that was capable of this kind of ad insertion would need more sophisticated internal hardware than most existing devices currently come with — and this is the same company that feuded with Google a few years ago because it didn't want to. Pay for more expensive chips that can decode Google's AV1 video codec.