When you’re not watching Barkitecture or the Weird Al movie on your Roku, the device turns on its familiar scrolling, purple city-scape. Now you don’t just have to settle for a Flintstones-esque background of neoclassical buildings and the occasional billboard for PlutoTV when your Roku goes into rest mode. The TV viewing platform is introducing a new screensaver feature called Backdrops.
The new viewing feature turns your TV or viewing device into an Amazon Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, except Roku hasn’t taken away the only feature that gave it its name. Backdrops will show pictures of classic works of art by masters like Claude Monet and beautiful photos of landscapes that you can choose to display on your Roku device. The new Backdrops feature will start appearing on Roku-branded TVs and third-party Roku TVs in the next few weeks while customers with Roku streaming players and streambars will have to wait until the fall.
There are thousands of works of art and photos to choose from and even include descriptions so you can learn a little art history and geography while you’re vegging out in front of your TV. It’s not like you were doing anything important anyway on your couch on those sweatpants you don’t even wear outside when you’re taking out the garbage.
Roku’s Backdrops doesn’t just limit your choices to what it has to offer. You can also upload your own photos to your Roku account on the website from your computer and connect your Google Photos collection to your Roku. Backdrops can basically turn your boring wall into a museum if the entire museum could move around you to each work of art instead of the other way around.