It’s Saturday night, you’ve just settled onto the couch with a bowl of popcorn, ready to binge-watch your latest streaming obsession. You grab your Roku remote, hit the power button, and… instead of the familiar homescreen popping up, you’re greeted with a trailer for Moana 2. No warning, no opt-in—just an ad, blaring at you before you’ve even had a chance to navigate to your shows. For a growing number of Roku users, this isn’t a hypothetical scenario—it’s the frustrating new reality that hit their screens over the weekend.

According to a report from Ars Technica, Roku has quietly rolled out a new advertising tactic: startup video ads that play before users can even reach the homescreen. The move has sparked a wave of grumbling across platforms like Reddit and Roku’s own community forums, where users are making it clear they’re not here for it. “I’ll take the banner ads, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna put up with a video loading when loading up my Roku,” one Redditor vented. Another chimed in on the forum: “Just turned on my TV to see a video open on the homescreen and play some trailer? I hope this was a fluke.” Spoiler alert: it doesn’t seem to be.

For those unfamiliar with Roku’s business model, here’s the deal: the company isn’t raking in its profits from selling those budget-friendly streaming sticks and smart TVs. Nope, the real money comes from advertising. In 2024 alone, Roku’s ad revenue dwarfed its hardware sales, with the company pulling in over $3 billion from ads and content partnerships, according to its latest financials. Selling devices at razor-thin margins—or even a loss—is just a means to get more screens into homes, where the real cash cow lives: your eyeballs. It’s a playbook straight out of Amazon’s Fire TV strategy, and for a while, Roku made it work without ruffling too many feathers. But this latest ad experiment? It might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

To be fair, Roku isn’t forcing you to sit through the full Moana 2 trailer—you can exit out once it starts. But that small mercy hasn’t done much to calm the storm of irritation brewing online. “I trashed all of my Amazon boxes years ago because of this garbage,” one user fumed on the Roku forum. “If it keeps up, my Rokus will be next.” It’s a sentiment that’s popping up more and more, and it’s not hard to see why. There’s something uniquely infuriating about being ambushed by an ad before you’ve even had a chance to settle in. It’s like walking into a store and having a salesperson shove a flyer in your face before you’ve crossed the threshold.

Roku, for its part, seems aware that it’s treading on thin ice. On the company’s most recent earnings call in February 2025, founder and CEO Anthony Wood addressed the delicate dance of squeezing more ad dollars out of the platform without alienating its 80 million-plus active users. “Our strategy of making better use of our homescreen is not just about putting a marquee video ad on the homescreen,” Wood said. “We are very careful about putting ads on our homescreen. We’re very focused on both driving more monetization but also driving increased customer satisfaction. We have a very iconic homescreen, consumers love it. We have no intention of breaking it.”

That “iconic” homescreen Wood’s so proud of? It’s the simple, tile-based layout that’s made Roku a go-to for cord-cutters since the early 2010s. It’s clean, intuitive, and—until recently—mostly free of the kind of aggressive ad creep that’s plagued competitors like Amazon’s Fire TV. But “mostly free” doesn’t mean “entirely free.” Roku’s been inching toward more dynamic ads for a while now. Last year, it started testing bigger, flashier homescreen promotions beyond the static banners of old. And let’s not forget the company’s wilder ambitions—like that patent it filed to inject ad overlays into HDMI-connected devices, a move that’d let Roku plaster ads over your PlayStation or cable box.

When Ars Technica reached out for comment, Roku didn’t exactly backpedal. Instead, it leaned into the corporate buzzword playbook, framing the Moana 2 startup ad as part of its relentless pursuit of progress. “Roku has and will always require continuous testing and innovation across design, navigation, content, and our first-rate advertising products,” the company said in a statement. The goal, apparently, is to find “new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience.” Judging by the online backlash, though, “delightful” isn’t the word most users would use right now.

This isn’t Roku’s first brush with ad-related controversy. Back in 2023, the company caught flak for rolling out more prominent homescreen ads, including video previews that auto-played when you hovered over certain tiles. Users grumbled, but it didn’t spark the kind of uproar we’re seeing now—maybe because those ads were still confined to the homescreen, not gatekeeping your entire TV experience. The startup ad feels different. It’s not just an annoyance you can scroll past; it’s an intrusion that hits you the second you turn on your device. And for a company that’s built its reputation on being the user-friendly alternative to Big Tech’s streaming giants, that’s a risky gamble.

Roku’s not alone in pushing the ad envelope. Amazon’s been stuffing Fire TV with full-screen ads for years, and even premium services like Netflix and Disney+ have dipped their toes into ad-supported tiers to juice up their bottom lines. According to a 2024 report from The Wall Street Journal, streaming platforms collectively pulled in $8.3 billion in ad revenue last year, a number that’s only expected to climb as cord-cutting accelerates. For companies like Roku, which don’t have the deep content libraries of Netflix or the e-commerce empire of Amazon, ads are the lifeblood. But there’s a catch: lean too hard into them, and you risk driving customers straight into the arms of competitors like Apple TV or Google’s Chromecast—devices that cost more upfront but promise a less ad-heavy experience.

So where does Roku go from here? If the Reddit threads are any indication, the company might want to rethink this startup ad experiment before it turns into a full-blown revolt. Users are already swapping tips on how to dodge the ads—everything from unplugging their devices to switching to rival platforms.

In the meantime, the next time you fire up your Roku, don’t be surprised if Moana’s sailing across your screen before you’ve even picked a show. Just keep that remote handy—and maybe start eyeing the exit button.