Smart TV manufacturers, TV platform developers and streaming providers are increasingly relying on personalized advertising for revenue. The shift towards advertising-financed media is taking place across the entire TV landscape: TV manufacturers also want to make money from the sets they have already sold. Samsung, LG, Vizio & Co. have therefore developed special solutions for targeted advertising. Tech companies such as Amazon and Google no longer just produce software and hardware for streaming. They also use the huge amounts of data about their users for personalized ads on their TV platforms. Manufacturers of streaming boxes such as the US company Roku not only want to participate in this business, they want to shake it up.

Within this web of data monsters, Roku has developed from a hardware producer into an advertising group, writes Vox magazine. The manufacturer of smart TV surfaces and streaming sticks has reported annual advertising revenue of 3.5 billion US dollars for 2024, which corresponds to 85% of its total revenue. Only recently, Roku made headlines with experiments in a particularly aggressive approach: The company plays users advertising clips such as a trailer for the movie "Moana 2" before they even reach the home screen. It already attracted attention last year with a patent application for a technology that also feeds advertisements into HDMI feeds.

The technology behind this is Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which researchers drew attention to in October. It works like this: Smart TVs regularly create hashes from the visible and sometimes audible content. These "fingerprints" are uploaded in encrypted form to the manufacturer's clouds and compared on the server side with a database of primarily films, series and games. In the event of a match, the manufacturer knows what the user is currently watching or playing. This allows them to generate comprehensive profiles and serve advertising to match. Yash Vekaria, a doctoral student at the University of California in Davis who was involved in the analysis, described the HDMI espionage made possible in this way as "the most outrageous thing we have found". Viewers who pay for ad-free content contribute to the system by sharing their data with the streaming platforms and TV producers they use.

According to Vox, Roku has recently acquired ACR-related companies on a large scale. As early as 2023, a proprietary technology won an Emmy for advances in this field. Roku even boasts that the scope of its internal data collection capabilities is "unprecedented", as its share of the TV operating system market is 40 percent. According to the market research company Antenna, 43% of all streaming subscriptions in the US were ad-supported by the end of 2024, which illustrates the industry's shift towards such models. Most users unknowingly consent to monitoring when setting up their devices. While consumers can disable ACR in their TV settings, many are unaware of the "feature". In addition, opting out often restricts the functionality of the devices and services.

(nen)