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.
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.
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”!
Pihole also has a docker distribution, so it’ll also run easily on “appliance” NAS solutions with minimal effort
Thank you for the explanation. I felt very out of the loop on this whole thread. I’ll look into pihole.
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.
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
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.
I can confirm that I’m blocking all the Roku ads with adguard now. You just plug this list in: https://oisd.nl/
I use roku…I might have to try a pihole…or switch to something else. Damn shame just about everything gets ruined by greed.