TL;DR
- User reports recently claimed that Roku was pushing pause-screen ads out across multiple streaming services.
- The company denies these allegations, and insists that it only serves pause ads on The Roku Channel.
- Roku is also not overlaying ads on HDMI inputs.
People working in advertising have an almost preternatural ability to make our lives suck just a little bit more, and over the past few years, their tireless creativity has brought us all a cozy new hell to enjoy: advertisements forced upon us just for daring to pause streaming content. From YouTube, to Amazon Prime Video, to Peacock, streamers have eagerly embraced this new home for ads, offensive if just for its novelty alone. And this week, Roku users started panicking that pause ads were coming for them — and worse, in a form that appeared to be system-wide, rather than tied to specific streaming services. Now, Roku is speaking out against those claims.
Roku tells Android Authority that while the company does offer a Pause Ad option for advertisers, the screens being shared on social media surrounding this week’s story are something else entirely — and not from Roku itself. While the company did not speculate about the ultimate origin of any of that imagery, it’s emphatic that the company’s Pause Ad offerings will only ever surface in the free Roku Channel.
That still isn’t great-great, but it’s also a whole lot less bad than the situation initially looked.
In our earlier coverage we also mentioned a Roku patent that discusses applying ads not to streaming content at all, but devices connected to your Roku box over HDMI input — stuff like gaming consoles, or Blu-Ray players. In a statement to 9to5Google, Roku clarifies that patent or not, the company is not currently serving ads over HDMI connections in this manner.
The landscape of ads in general may be changing for the worse, but at least Roku users have one less thing to worry about right now — and with those recent HDR problems, they’ve definitely got enough on their plate.
