DirecTV is teaming up with Glance to bring AI-powered interactive ads to its Gemini devices in early 2026.
When your TV goes idle, instead of a screensaver, it will show AI-generated scenes. These scenes will place you, and even your pets, inside virtual environments. Maybe you’re wearing a new jacket or sitting on a sofa you don’t actually own. If you like what you see, you can scan a QR code to buy the real thing.
Once again, companies are betting on AI to convince people to spend more money. And once again, the lines between reality and fantasy continue to blur for users.
The AI Ad You Star In
Glance’s technology uses selfies to create these lifelike simulations. It doesn’t just display a product. It reimagines you inside a purchasable fantasy.
Instead of showing a brand’s commercial, Glance performs reverse image searches to find real-world items that resemble what appears in the AI-generated scene. Clothing, furniture, accessories. Anything could become part of your personalized product catalog.
Users can change the colors, swap styles, or tweak the environment, turning passive screen time into an interactive experience. What looks like a background image becomes a personal storefront.
Selling Through the Mirror
DirecTV isn’t alone in this experiment. Glance, a subsidiary of Indian ad-tech firm InMobi, is part of a growing movement to embed AI-powered advertising into the user experience. InMobi has spent years developing ways to integrate tracking into connected devices.
Now, with help from Google’s on-device AI, Glance is expanding its reach to the living room. Beyond screensavers, into menus and launchers across the entire TV interface. In other words, the television that once delivered ads between shows is becoming the ad itself.
The Price of “Personalization”
There’s a bigger issue here. You guessed it: privacy.
Glance’s parent company, InMobi, has a record of integrating data collection tools into devices. They don’t always make that process clear either. With DirecTV’s new partnership, users are asked to upload images of themselves to create AI-generated content that encourages them to buy more things.
The company says these ads are opt-in with users in control. When those ads rely on facial data, preferences, or behavioral tracking, “opt-in” feels like a technicality. Even if users agree, what happens to the data afterward? Where do those AI-created versions of you live once you turn the TV off?
The New Definition of Watching
DirecTV and Glance describe their collaboration as an “interactive, personalized entertainment experience.”
That phrasing may sound harmless, but it changes the idea of what it means to watch something. We used to consume ads. Now, they consume us.
We’re entering the next phase of advertising. One where the viewer becomes the subject. The living room becomes a marketplace.
It’s invasive, maybe even inevitable.
The promise of personalization has always been seductive. As AI turns entertainment into an interactive mirror, we have to ask ourselves something important. At what point does “personalization” turn into surveillance?
