Roku has been experimenting with the idea of superimposing marketing campaigns over HDMI input signals in an attempt to in terms of money support your TV in a novel way.
Contemporary smart TVs are sometimes offered for little to no profit, with the intention of eventually making more money by way of advertising. However, if you decide to use an HDMI device instead of the built-in OS on many of these TVs, you can lose that profit.
It appears such as Roku has discovered a possible fix.
In a patent that Lowpass originally discovered, Roku is experimenting with superimposing advertisements over an HDMI input.
The concept of determining when information streaming through an HDMI input stops and displaying an advertisement at that moment is explained in the company’s patent. It is necessary to watch the video and audio stream to ensure that the time is correct because Roku is unable to “talk” to the connected device over HDMI, at least not to the extent that it is possible.
The patent goes on to detail methods of content detection and metadata scraping to display advertisements on an HDMI-connected device that are relevant to the game, movie, or show the viewer is now watching.
There’s not any guarantee that this will occur, but it’s an intriguing and slightly worrying thought for the future of smart TVs. For the time being, this is only a patent. There’s not any evidence that Roku has yet figured out how they can do this or developed a system to put it on TVs. It seems likely that this will eventually occur, though, since that the corporation has previously experimented with various types of “idle” advertising, such putting adverts on the screensaver.
Additionally, there is some technological precedent for this kind of functionality. Roku TVs have had the ability to superimpose “more ways to watch” over HDMI inputs for a number of years.