Can Sticky Screensavers Save the Streaming Biz?
Recently I moved most of my TV viewing from a Fire TV to Roku. I’m a DVR user that pauses a lot, so Roku City quickly became a part of my life. And I’ll admit, it began to annoy me.
To Roku’s credit, the device makes it easy to change the Screensaver in various ways. I chose the personal photo stream. And I love it--so much so that I’ve developed a new photography habit and since purchased another Roku TV just to be able to showcase my photos on another screen in our home, foisting them on my family twenty-four seven.
The experience has cast doubt on my previously held belief that most households don’t make TV purchasing decisions based on the TV’s operating system, let alone a single feature like the Screensaver. And my guess is that fewer still have the same operating system attached to all TVs in the house.
With Fire TV, I sort of ignored the screensaver, and in retrospect that’s because it didn’t actively annoy me the way Roku City did. I didn’t see it coming that I would fall in love with Roku’s Photo Stream and that taking pictures for it would become a new hobby and habit for me.
I’m an odd bird, so to interpret these types of revelations my readers and followers know that I rely on solid low-cost census-adjusted polling techniques to find out just how much my various TV experience observations might matter to the evolution of the industry. Thus was born the title topic of my Winter 2025 #FutureOfTV.Live Quarterly Report, Watching Screensavers.
Can Screensavers play a critical role in the #FutureOfTV? If so, what does that mean for the future of streaming? Is Roku City a disaster in the making? Is Photostream a secret weapon that no one fully appreciates? Read on to find out.
As per usual, I mixed it up with several other topics including interactivity, DVR usage, and Be Right Back slates. Here are some of the report highlights.
One-Fifth of TV Viewers Love Their Screensaver
20% of respondents rated their default screensaver as a "Love it!" feature. Another 28% reported that they "Like it" with very few negative vibes on the subject. The evidence here is that I’m old and crotchety, most folks don’t seem to mind it.
But that’s why I do these polls in the first place. (Note, take all of the data presented here with a grain of salt. These are high margin of error polls meant to be interpreted carefully.)
Another insight? Apple TV and Google TV, neither of which I personally use, generated the highest scores for this question. This suggests a special love for those devices (more info on that in the full report, where you can access cross-tabs by device and DVR usage.)
After seeing this data, I cross-checked it with some gen AI searching and found this summary table from a Digital Trends article.
Table: Digital Trends evaluated screensavers across major streaming platforms and ranked them as follows:
- Apple TV 4K: Tops the list with its high-resolution Aerial screensavers, offering dynamic flyovers of global locations.
- Amazon Fire TV: Features the Ambient Experience, combining background images with optional widgets such as weather, calendar, and smart home controls.
- Google TV: Emphasizes photo displays, allowing users to showcase personal albums through Google Photos or select from curated images and artwork.
- Roku: Offers various screensaver options, including the ability to use personal photos through Photo Streams. However, its screensavers are considered more basic compared to other platforms.
My conclusion is that he TV screensaver has slowly baked itself into people’s lives. This could provide hidden opportunity for content studios and channels seeking to increase their share of time in the viewers’ mind. After all, it’s widely known that some significant portion of viewership is “background TV." My last study on the topic, in 2023, showed nearly 85% reported some background TV viewing during the previous week.
Can they save the streaming business? No. But depending on the platform, they might provide a fresh strategic lever by which you can differentiate your platform or service to resonate with a certain target market.
Two Surprising Unlocks for Interactive TV
Leverage the remote control and target your experience at DVR users. That’s my takeaway from the data.
I’ve long appreciated the value of the remote control and its centrality in the history of TV technology. It’s an iconic innovation, a killer app of features that lives at the intersection of choice and control, two critical consumer drivers of the television user experience.
Despite the advent of mobile apps, smart speakers and wearables, this small piece of plastic is as relevant today as ever. This data emphasizes the point with a fresh lens.
When asked about their preferences for engaging in interactive viewing behavior, the remote control was selected by more than half of the respondents, more than two-times the next most popular option.
Also noteworthy was how low QR Codes scored. I was sad to see this because I have always been, and remain, a big fan of the idea. I think campaign execution and creative details matter here and that it’s a technique that can work. But the data points to a steep climb. The ubiquity of the QR code on TV is a phenomenon that seems disconnected to viewing preferences for interactive activation.
What about DVR users? As noted in the intro, the survey’s main topic of Screensavers meant the instrument had to include a question about DVR usage. Pressing pause on live TV, or DVR playback, is one way to trigger the launch of the screensaver.
Since I had the data, I was curious about the relationship between DVR users and the level of interest expressed in interactive experiences.
I found something striking which you can see in the chart below.
DVR users are far more likely to have high interest levels in engaging with interactive TV experiences. That’s interesting, considering that DVR users often watch live events on a slightly delayed basis, so they can catch up to live while skipping commercials.
This should give pause to anyone developing so-called ten-foot interactive TV experiences that rely primarily on the mobile phone and not the remote control. It also speaks to the power of the CTV gatekeepers in this domain. And if we zoom out and visualize the fragmentation of the TV OEM business, we can see pretty quickly why getting an interactive TV experience built, distributed and monetized across such a hugely fragmented landscape is a very difficult nut to crack for all but the very biggest content brands.
Be-Right-Back-After-the-Break Slates Are Everywhere
Everyone inside the streaming business, and presumably all my readers, know full-well the challenges associated with unfilled ad breaks and those Be Right Back slates. These represent lost revenue for us, as linear streaming TV ad inventory is “perishable” in business speak, meaning not recoverable any more than a spoiled banana that a grocer has to throw away or an empty seat on the plane already headed to JFK.
But how pervasive is this phenomenon across a very broad mass population sample?
What this means is open to interpretation, but I’m seeing 58% of regular TV viewers could easily identify that they have seen "Be Right Back" (BRB) slates at least a few times and 25% selecting they had seen “a lot of them." This is now a ubiquitous mass-market phenomenon that is, in my opinion, here to stay for a long time. We saw roughly the same results across all devices, although, ironically, advertising king Google TV had slightly worse scores on this dimension, which was amusing but probably not statistically significant.
How should we interpret this? And a more important question: Is this a problem to be solved? Or rather, can we mitigate it with better content?
I’m increasingly of the view that blank ad slates are not a problem that urgently needs to be “solved” by filling the slots with ads. Rather, my overall conclusions from the Screensaver data above suggest that mitigating this issue with better nature or ambient viewing content could provide an effective alternative to more ambitious attempts to completely solve the problem, which might simply not be possible.
The success of YouTube TV’s Moment of Zen, which just recently rolled out brand new original content investments and a twenty-four seven channel of nothing but nature content also supports this position. In this way, Be Right Back content and Screensaver content have some commonality. To learn more about the types that TV viewers want to see on their screensaver, download the full report.
Viewers Can’t be Bought (At Least Not for a Free Cup of Coffee)
And finally, for a very specific QR code use case outlined in a video here, I wanted to know what kind of incentive and how much would be required by a FAST channel owner that wanted to collect viewer data by QR code deployed in their Be Right Back slot.
For weeks, I debated whether to use $3 or $5 as an incentive in my survey instrument. I wanted to test different currency types so I had to choose one, and I wanted to find the magic number that would pull a majority of the audience..
Now I know: I should have picked the larger number.
Regardless, the insight remains. Both top options did not offer direct monetary rewards at all, but seem to suggest more powerful motivations are at play for the majority of consumers. One of these, a contest with real prizes, is of course tried and true in the TV business, particularly with game show audiences.
And the second is also a positive for TV. If you have a compelling product or service and creative to go with it, TV can draw people to action.
That’s a wrap. Questions? Comments? Nothing would make me happier than getting your direct feedback to Brian[at]RingDigital.tv. I’m always seeking new ideas for my quarterly reports so take action right now and give me a holler.
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