alt Hacker NewsI'm happy to see it. They should have included Roku in that too!
> Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching.
https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-...
I wouldn't be surprised if my PS5 was doing the same thing when I'm playing a game or watching a streaming service through it.
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That sounds so expensive it's hard to see it making money. You'd processing a 2fps video stream for each customer. That's a huge amount of data.
And all that is for the chance to occasionally detect that someone's seen an ad in the background of a stream? Do any platforms even let a streamer broadcast an NFL game like the example given?
This is especially annoying and just incredibly creepy -- I was watching a clip of Smiling Friends on YouTube (via my Apple TV), and I suddenly got a banner telling me to watch this on HBO Max.
I never felt more motivated to pi-hole the TV.
It’s far less important for ad-free content. They mainly want to connect your ad watching behaviour to an email and then have loyalty program data connected to the same email so that they can identify which ads convert vs not.
So potentially completely noncompliant if used in a business. E.g. it may have HIPAA, top secret etc.
I'd like to weaponize all this scanning into a force for good. Instead of phoning home to Roku, send the fingerprints up to an ADID database registering every ad on the planet. Open up an API so that any video stream can detect an ad and inject Max Headroom replacement clips.
Come on hackers. We could murder the global economy with this shit.
The only real question is whether they're doing screen-level analysis or just relying on app telemetry
Does this apply for external video inputs, outside of the smart TV OS?
I guess I can always just refuse the TV OS access to the wifi, assuming they're not using 4G modems.
The PS5 doesn't need to, they get it all in metadata because they control the full stack — TVs do it because they have less control over sources.
> > Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution.
Isn't that too much data to even begin to analyze? The only winner here seems like S3.
I'm fairly puzzled by my own reaction to this.
I'm indifferent to YouTube have frame-by-frame nanodata about me.
But as a Roku user, this snap shotting makes me very angry.
Maybe because much of what I watch on my TV via my Roku is content I own and stream from my personal server?
Most likely case is that the tv is computing hash locally and sending the hash. Judging by my dnstap logs, roku TV maintains a steady ~0.1/second heartbeat to `scribe.logs.roku.com` with occasional pings to `captive.roku.com`. The rest are stragglers that are blocked by `*.roku.com` DNS blackhole. Another thing is `api.rokutime.com`, but as of writing it's a CNAME to one of `roku.com` subdomains.
The block rates seem to correlate with watch time increasing to ~1/second, so it's definitely trying to phone home with something. Too bad it can't since all its traffic going outside LAN is dropped with prejudice.
If your network allows to see stuff like that, look into what PS5 is trying to do.