Roku TVs Display the Message "Hello,Carol," but What Does That Message Mean?

For millions of streamers around the world, the Roku homescreen is a familiar sight whenever they are in between shows or have gotten up to make dinner. Typically, the screen cycles through a fictitious city landscape, and if you look closely, you can see vague references to a variety of classic movies and TV shows.

Sometimes, though, Roku also uses the space as an advertisement for new media, which is why so many people were confused to see the message "Hello, Carol" on the marquee of the Roku city's movie theater. Here's what we know about what it means.

Your Roku city features the message "Hello, Carol" because it's a piece of viral marketing for the Apple TV+ series Pluribus. The show, which was created by Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan, has already become one of the biggest hits in the history of the streaming service. The show's first season wrapped up on Dec. 23, but there are already plans for a second season.

Pluribus and the Apple team have been engaging in this kind of viral marketing since before the show premiered, and the show's main character is named Carol. The reason this marketing has been so effective is in part because it makes you wonder what the show is about, and in part because it doesn't initially seem to be an advertisement for anything at all. You have to look it up to understand what the message means. Long story short, though, it's an ad for Pluribus.

In order to explain the ad, you need to understand the premise of Pluribus, so if you don't want to know that information, you should leave now.

Pluribus is set in a world very much like our own, where an alien virus is discovered, and after breaking containment, it joins all of the consciousnesses of every human on the planet into a single entity. They have the memories of individual people, but they share knowledge communally.

This is true for almost everyone on Earth, but there are a select number of people, including Carol, the show's main character, who are immune to the virus. As a result, the people who are part of the hive mind work to cater to the needs of Carol and the other people like her, even as Carol finds herself disturbed by her new reality and eager to go back to a world where everyone is their own person.

So the message "Hello, Carol" is designed as one coming from the hive mind to the show's main character. They pop up all over the series, especially in its earliest episodes, as the hive mind tries to convince Carol that they are friendly and mean no harm. Whether that's actually true or not, you'll have to watch the series to find out. But the message itself is designed to earn Carol's trust.