Roku Further Enshittifies Its Streaming Product With Compulsory Ads On Login

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the inch-by-inch dept

The enshittification of Roku’s streaming service, by which the company seeks the exact pinpoint at which it can extract the most amount of money from its customers without fostering a mass exodus of those same customers, continues. While Roku is not alone in the world of streaming services descending into this muck, it has been interesting to watch the company’s steady drumbeat engaging in this process, inch by inch, as though it wants to see precisely how much it can get away with in order to satisfy the quarterly-numbers class.

It started with feuds between Roku and content transmitters, like YouTube TV, over rights to content, looking for all the world like the content provider disputes that plagued cable TV. Then there was the firmware update that came with new terms of service that stripped those that already owned Roku devices and service of their legal rights, with the device rendered non-functional until those ToS were accepted. And because this is all very predictable, then came the ads. Roku filed a patent that would cover injecting ads into its Roku TVs, even if you were, say, playing a game on a console and paused it. Most recently came another firmware update fuck up, which would lock in device settings that users often hate, such as motion-blurring.

And now we’re back to more ads, it seems. It’s important to keep in mind that all of this gruel forced down the throats of the public isn’t being visited upon only new Roku customers. It gets rolled out to existing customers, as well. That means the experience people signed up for when they bought, say, their Roku TV is being torn away from them, replaced with something shittier. Like, say, Roku’s experiment to force people to watch advertisements before being allowed to get into their device to begin with.

Owners of smart TVs and streaming sticks running Roku OS are already subject to video advertisements on the home screen. Now, Roku is testing what it might look like if it took things a step further and forced people to watch a video ad play before getting to the Roku OS home screen.

Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS’ home screen started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: “I just turned on my Roku and got an … ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen.” Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. The ads have a close option, but some users appear to have not seen it.

When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out.

Well, isn’t that nice? An experiment, apparently without any adequate notification, that erodes the user experience of the customer. Was there a way to opt out of this company’s “experiment”? It doesn’t appear so, based on all the confusion and anger among the customer base. Of which, by the way, there was a great deal.

Forum users who worried the change was permanent called the ads “unacceptable” and “intrusive.”

If Roku increases its ad load on customer devices from still images to ads with moving pictures with sound, it will test customers’ limits. Some who have tolerated a static image on a neglected part of their screen may not be as accepting of more distracting ad formats.

“I could accept the static ad on the side. Forcing a loud commercial is awful,” one Redditor wrote.

To treat even a subset of customers so callously has all the hallmarks of a brand in the decline of enshittification. Absent from all of this, including Roku’s statements, is even an iota of concern for the customers or how they experience the Roku platform. It’s a trial balloon, designed not to test anything other than the customers’ patience.

You can imagine the board meeting now. How much uproar was there? Did we get threats to cancel any services? What percentage threatened that? How does that compare with the revenue we would make with the remaining customers that we don’t think will cancel on us or change devices? Which dollar amount is higher, because that’s all the matters? Well, that and our stock price, which is about one-seventh of what it was a couple years ago?

This story typically ends in only one way, which is a company a fraction of the value it had before it decided to try to cash in to keep Wall Street happy. The hemovores are in charge now, feeding off of short-term stock jumps that may or may not come to be, but for which all is sacrificed.

Just don’t expect all that many people to stick around to watch the corpse wither.

Filed Under: ads, enshittification, smart tvs, streaming
Companies: roku