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 suspect they might be talking about a DNS based ad blocking solution. Like Pi-Hole or AdGaurd DNS.
They work by blocking DNS requests made by ads so the content can never be accessed. They’re theoretically more powerful than browser extensions as they have the opportunity to block ads anywhere.
While we have one (Pi-hole) I can’t use it right now because some of my roommate’s work software won’t run with it and we haven’t had time to troubleshoot. So I have a bunch of extensions in my browser on my pc
You could configure the DNS only on devices that don’t have issues with it rather than the network as a whole?
That, and you can also decide what (if anything) gets blocked on a per MAC/IP/FQDN basis, so you can explicitly allow ads for specific devices.