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Imagine settling in to watch a movie with your family and discovering that you can’t use your TV until you’ve watched an ad for another flick. No scrolling, no clicking away, nothing—not until you’ve seen the entire trailer for Moana 2. That’s the situation Roku users are reportedly reckoning with after an update that autoplays advertisements when Roku-equipped TVs are switched on.
In a Reddit post spotted by Ars Technica on Monday, u/jehsickkuhhh says they “turned on [their] Roku and got an unskippable ad for a movie, before [they] got to the regular Roku home screen.” Several other users replied that they’d experienced the same thing; a trailer for Moana 2, which Disney released last year, was the most common culprit. One person said they didn’t experience the pre-home screen video ad every time they went to the home screen, but that they’d already seen it occur once that day.
“This started last night for me,” one user replied. “Pretty disappointing and intrusive. I can’t imagine it’s enough to make me leave Roku, since I already have three sticks and two Roku TVs, but I won’t be buying any future [Roku] devices.”
Not everyone is so patient. This seems to be the last straw for many Roku users, who had already been dealing with pause screen ads and partial-screen home ads.
Credit: Roku
“I could accept the static ad on the side,” one Reddit user commented on the aforementioned Reddit post. “Forcing a loud commercial is awful.”
“If it keeps up, my Roku devices will be in the trash,” another user said.
If these Redditors are lucky, the pre-home screen ads won’t be around for long. When Ars Technica reached out to Roku for comment, a representative called the ads a “test,” describing them as “the latest example” of what’s clearly a long and varied list of ad strategies. The representative didn’t respond to questions regarding whether the pre-home screen ads would become a permanent fixture, nor how it was responding to customer backlash.
In the meantime, some Roku users are seeking out alternatives to the Roku streaming ecosystem. In alternate threads about the new ads, many Reddit users have said they’re moving to Apple TV, which offers a cleaner (though not entirely ad-free) user interface. Others have indicated that they’ve installed (or are planning to install) network-wide ad-blocking technologies like Pihole, though these methods aren’t foolproof; some ads still slip through the cracks.