Removing Ads on Home Screen
Looks like Roku is going to follow Google Android and Amazon and start adding more and more ads everywhere you look. Turned on Roku this morning and more ads have been added to the Home Screen (asid...
Forum Discussion
The lower left ad is reserved mainly (for now, at least) special promotions/upcoming events/partner channels available on Roku. They used to be Roku and Roku Channel-exclusive promotions, but have expanded a bit.
For those bothered by this extra ad, they do come and go and are not always there. They will show for a few days or so and then disappear. They are not yet a constant fixture.
Truthfully, I think the more you use Roku, the less you will even notice the ads since you are only on the Home Screen to find your channels/apps. For me, I actually do find some some of the content advertised as helpful as I probably would not have it discovered it otherwise. Now if they start using these ad spaces to start hawking laundry detergent, cars, and products (other than streaming related), then I would likely view them differently.
My biggest issue with the ad in the lower left corner is that the play/pause button activates it. This basically removes any ability to enter the "secret menu" that allows me to disable HDR, check signal strength, etc. I use this quite a bit, as my TCL Roku tvs do not have a strong enough backlight to be able to see some of the HDR programming. Until these ads arrived, I had just been able to use this menu to disable HDR and watch my show with the normal (and brighter) resolution. Now every time I try it ends up launching whatever garbage Hulu is trying to get me to watch.
I don't mind ads, as they are pretty much everywhere these days, but linking them to the play button instead of just letting interested users navigate to the ad and select is quite the oversight in my opinion.
Please find another way to activate this ad, or at least give us a way to temporarily disable it so we can use all the features we are used to.
Good thing is that the lower ad is temporary in nature. (usually only sticks around for 2-3 days), but does hinder usage of the special/hidden menu feature when they are showing.
Since Roku considers the special/hidden menus as "unsupported" and not really meant for the end-user to routinely interact with, I'm afraid the requested change will likely fall on deaf ears.
I don't know why they didn't stick with the asterisk (*) button to interact with these ads like they do for the large one on the right. I assume they learned that some users have a habit of pressing the Play/Pause button quite a bit (ie. trying to escape screensaver mode) that likely results in a greater percentage of users triggering the lower left ad. (could just be the cynic in me though).
