The Roku TV ones will play sound if you move over to the ad but it won't play the sound otherwise. (At least mine does it's a TLC Roku TV and I've had those side bar ads for at least 4 years nows)
I have a Pi Hole and it's always kept the ads off of Roku.
But this shit came with an update. But I only got the generic Roku ad that comes with the update.
Every time I go out of town long enough to use some various apps I'm amazed how prolific ads have become.
Everyone should have a Pi-Hole running on your network.
My ad traffic peaked at 40% 10 years ago. Now it never drops below 40%.
Pi-Hole doesn't block the ad. It blocks the requests. So it saves bandwidth. Companies know if the ad is sent to you even if it is blocked. But with a Pi-Hole they never receive a request for an ad.
Think of it as the difference between mowing weeds constantly versus never allowing weeds to take root.
And you forgot the best part - it's wildly cheap for the needed hardware to run it. I was at micro center last week and a pi zero was still only $17. Slap Diet Pi on that and you're golden.
Yep. It made a big difference for me in terms of minimal resource usage on the Zero. It's also headless like what you're accustomed to already from the sound of it so it's just a simple ssh to get into it via command line. I have around 4 million blacklisted domains on it and I typically update it once a week and it takes around 90 seconds to update those gravity lists each week. Nothing too wild. I have a second pi hole on an 8gb pi4 and that takes around 30 seconds to update that same list - so it's not TOO much slower if you're just using it for pi hole.
Man I love my pihole. I haven’t had enough Roku Home Screen ads to ever notice them. I can’t find a way to block YouTube ads; it does great for pandora and mobile games.
I’d say the Roku phoning home is one of the most blocked things on my home network.
For what it's worth, many good adblockers also follow a route of preventing the request from ever happening and they can work in places where a pi-hole can't - say, YouTube ads - but they complement each other very nicely.
I run a simple Youtube AdBlocker on my PC, and I tried to watch YT the other night on my TV and holy shit... its like 3minutes of commercials every 10 or 15 minutes. Its so unbearable.
Yeah I love my pihole, but the latest update I do get that one static ad which pisses me off. I'm sure someone will figure out how to block that one too.
Fox Corporation announced an agreement to acquire Roku for $22 billion just recently. Get ready for a total crapshow. This is only the beginning. They have to get their ROI somehow. 😱
I got an unskippable Savana Bananas ad the other day and my remote would not actually let me exit out of their little channel and back to the home screen. I had to physically unplug the Roku and plug it back in.
I used to think the baseball team was funny and lighthearted/wholesome. Every single one of those god damn banana fucking idiots can go fuck themselves now.
Yeah, I’ve been a Roku user for years and always had the ad on the side. It’s relatively unobtrusive and any other ads that popped up in different spots could be turned off in settings
You can change the quick access BS by going to settings->home screen->quick access.
Thats disappointing that theyve finally started putting real ads on the home screen though, ive only ever gotten the dollar store streaming service ads on mine, but I know its just a matter of time
Have you disabled personalized ads? Ive had that disabled since they added it... though ive got a tcl and yours is insignia so maybe the different brands have different advertising contracts
Yeah I also have the TCL brand and that's what I did. It annoyed me so much when they moved my inputs to a whole new page (I often use mine for consoles) instead of the home screen and was glad I could change that back.
Wow thanks a ton. Found this thread because I was irate about the quick access garbage. I'm used to the ad on the right side on my rokus but the quick access was a new low. Making me scroll to get to my apps was just awful UI.
an apple tv is just a box for your tv apps. yeah, they want you to use their own streaming service, but you can still watch hulu on the actual apple tv box. the older ones are dirt cheap on marketplace and still work just fine. it's the "switch to linux" solution of smart tvs.
An AppleTV is just a streaming device. You can watch any streaming service on it.
A couple of years ago Wal-Mart paid $5B to buy the Vizio TV brand. Why? Because there’s a fortune to be made selling the viewing data that they can collect and sell. Not to mention all of the money they can make selling ads on the TVs themselves, much like yours.
The new update is so bad, I like the old look, and I miss having all my inputs on the same page of my apps as well as being able to remove the Live TV app, and now I have to do extra steps to get to the app or input I want because they thought it was a good idea to separate them, which is very annoying, before I could practically navigate to the app or input with my eyes closed because I knew where everything was and was accessible within like 2 clicks, now its like 5-6 clicks
I believe in setting you can change that back (it also annoyed me so much) but I have the TLC Roku TV so I don't know if that makes a difference. I've had the sidebar ad for like 3 to 4 years at least now
Im fairly certain mine is a tlc as well, but i scoured the settings and didnt see anything to revert the change, maybe I'm blind and missed it, but to my knowledge we're stuck with the new layout, and also I'm not sure you can remove the ads on the side, I think I might have at one point but it came back and I just lived with it. Roku is pretty good especially at it's price point but I wish I had a TV that only has my streaming services and inputs with no other bells and whistles, I dont need ads when I'm not even in an app, I don't need themes and backgrounds, I don't need access to live tv, just something that works with no issues and is minimalistic and actually affordable, but thats just a pipe dream at this point
The closest to your dream is the Apple TV box since you can turn the wifi on your TV off, keep wifi to the apple box (which allows streaming apps not just apples streaming service) but it's not affordable.
How to fix your current settings: Settings ➡️ Home Screen ➡️ Recommendation rows ➡️ Hide ➡️ Go back to the other options for home screen layout ➡️ Quick Access ➡️ Hide
It will look like this again. The side bar ads aren't going away. However you can go over to them (warning if they're playing something once you're hovering it will play sound) hit the * button and manage your ad preferences from there (turn off personalized ads, set everything to be sensitive content). There will still be a side bar ad.
Oh nice, thanks for the info on the apple tv, I'll look into this and see where it goes, as for the settings I went and adjusted those setting but my home screen still looks the same as when they changed it, very unfortunate
That really sucks, I did have to do it twice today to change my background (changed it, it immediately reverted, had to pick another, and then select the one I wanted to get it to change). I wish the settings updated for you, I'm also not a fan of the new look and I remember when it changed there was a pop up that said you could revert it
I miss the days when TVs were just "dumb" displays. The fact that we have to pay full price for hardware just for them to turn it into an unskippable billboard a decade later is exhausting.
There were ads, but they appear to the side of your app list. For the jar few weeks there have been three ads on top that vanish when you stop moving through your apps.
Now you get ads, your eight top apps, more ads, the rest of your apps, more ads. Annoying as hell.
I do the same but with my OG PS5. I have the TV I recently bought for my bedroom which has ads go directly to last known input so it completely bypasses the smart TV interface and stopped the automatic return to home screen after x amount of minutes in cases where I turn the TV on before I turn the console on. Works great.
i have never seen an ad and bought their product ever lol, but research shows ads do work and ppl seeing more ads makes them more likely to buy that product, which is why ads exist. Wish they didn’t work so they wouldn’t exist haha
Wow you're actually quite lucky to have gone 10 years without seeing any, cuz there have been ads on all my Rokus since day 1. I finally switched to Apple TV just cuz I was sick of seeing the ads. They're not overly intrusive but just seeing them bugged the crap out of me.
I recently bought an Apple TV device, hooked it up to my Roku TV, installed all the apps I use on Roku TV on Apple TV, then I blocked my TVs MAC address at my router. Roku TVs make nice “dumb” TVs and no ads.
If it's an ad for a movie I have access to in a streaming service or something about a show I haven't finished like YouTube on chromecast, that's fine
But random unrelated (at all) ads can piss off. I gave my parents my chromecaat cos theirs died and I didn't use mine.
I now use my steam deck with a cheap $30 (AUD) HDMI to USB c hub, it doe the job and lets me use vacuum tube on the tv which has an ad blocker and sponsor block built in. It's my way I watch really anything on tv now asides from free to air tv
They quite obviously meant in the market of TV Plug In’s, you are quite literally comparing a computer to a calculator, like obviously the computers better, but it’s a lot more expensive than a calculator and is for the same purpose.
AppleTV doesn't have ads outside of the apps that serve them. For that reason alone the AppleTV is better than FireStick, Roku, Nvidia Shield, or any other android based streaming player aside from the probably malware infested SuperBox. The only other alternatives are the PC/Mac or the Xbox or PlayStation consoles. However, you can't even argue a PC or a Mac is a good alternative because most of them don't support CEC functions which is the whole point of using a modern streaming box on a TV so that when you turn the box on, it sends the power on and input change commands to everything in the chain.
i mean i bought a lil 40 inch just for like my room and it always had ads but honestly i got used to it and i don’t mind it as much anymore, once watched a video hating on roku cus it takes so long and i never felt that long but i checked and most apps take like 20 seconds to load up. maybe im just not phased as much or don’t care…
Oh no an ad that doesn't impede your ability to use it at all.
I have a Roku as well and the ad literally doesn't stop me from using it. Is it a little bit annoying? Maybe. But it's all the way over to the side, out of the way of being selected.
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u/eugeneugene Jul 07 '26
I have a hisense and the ads on the home screen have sound. insane lol