Own a Roku TV or streaming device? You're about to see a lot more ads on your home screen - eviltoast

Ugh. Roku was one of the platforms with fewer ads.

  • Roku will be adding more ads to the home screens of its devices and TVs in the near future.
  • The ads will be interactive and ‘shoppable’ and will cover a range of industries, including restaurants and cars.
  • Roku already has a significant amount of ads on its home screen, and it is unclear if users will be able to change their preferences for the new ads.
  • Poggervania@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    For those with Roku TVs or any of their products, I found that a PiHole blocks the ads on the home screen so far. Hoping I could pick up an ONN box in the future so I can just not deal with this shit lol.

    • AtariDump@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      A pihole is a whole “home” adware/malware/spyware blocker. It runs on a raspberry Pi but can also run on a physical/virtual install of several different Linux distributions. Not only can it block ads on your computer but can also block ads on technology that you can’t (easily) block ads on (“Smart” TV / stock cellphone / IoT devices / etc). In addition, with some easy to instal additional (free) software you can block ads even when not at “home”!

      • gramathy@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Pihole also has a docker distribution, so it’ll also run easily on “appliance” NAS solutions with minimal effort

      • triptrapper@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Thank you for the explanation. I felt very out of the loop on this whole thread. I’ll look into pihole.

    • SharpieThunderflare@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      Yeah, DNS blocking is quite effective for not just ads, but also telemetry on Roku.

      Personally, I use nextdns until I can can a good pihole setup going.

      • NovaPrime@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        You can comfortably run pihole, unbound, and a VPN like wireguard on a pi zero or zero 2. You can find entire zero 2 kits for under $35 if you’re patient

        • SharpieThunderflare@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          Very true. Mostly just haven’t had the time. Also want to set up a little home server to play around with Proxmox and move Jellyfin off my main PC.