So you bought a new smart TV. You turn it on, browse through some setup screens you didn’t fully read, and start watching. Simple enough.
Over time, your television stops being a screen and turns into a two-way device. One that delivers content to you while simultaneously sending your viewing habits back to advertisers.
That setup process you clicked through? That was the agreement. And most people had no idea they were signing it. That is how we wound up in a timeline where your TV plays ads when you change the channel (yes, you read that correctly. I’ll explain in a bit).
The Smart TV Was Never Just a Screen
For decades, your television was a dumb terminal. It received a signal and displayed it. Advertisers had to work with rough estimates. They bought time slots and hoped the right people were watching.
Smart TVs changed that relationship. The moment a TV connects to the internet, it learns who you are, what you watch and for how long, when you pause, what you skip. That information is worth money, so TV manufacturers, and advertisers all agreed that the screen was now a business.
It’s why Hisense TVs are forcing non-skippable ads to play whenever users switch inputs, turn the TV on, or navigate the home screen. Hell, even changing the channels doesn’t save you. So far, it seems like lower-end units running Hisense’s VIDAA operating system, rebranded as Home OS, are affected. And these changes went into effect without user consent.
When complaints surfaced, Hisense described it as a limited “spot test” in Spain. But multiple users spanning multiple countries and years tell a different story.
The ads have led to the Texas Attorney General to file a lawsuit against Hisense and four other manufacturers. The lawsuit argues the use of Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, software that fingerprints whatever is on your screen to build ad targeting profiles violates privacy laws. It even goes as far to accuse Hisense of capturing viewer data every 500 milliseconds.
Broadcast TV Was Never This Bad. Why Not?
If you watched three hours of network television in the 1990s, you probably sat through about 45 minutes of ads. That ratio was regulated. The FCC set limits on how long ads would play per hour. Advertisers worked within those boundaries because they had no choice.
Streaming platforms don’t have those limits. They can run as many ads as they think you can tolerate without the option of skipping them. There’s no streaming equivalent of the FCC saying “enough is enough.” The only real check is user behavior and so far, most people keep watching.
You also need to factor in that ads can be personalized, which makes this feel even more invasive. Traditional TV ads were broad. A car commercial ran during the evening news because adults with car-buying money watched the evening news. Smart TV ads can be targeted to you based on what you’ve been watching, or the things you searched for, etc. And now they can get that data based on what you watched on TV last night.
How Your TV Became a Revenue Stream?
Yes, money plays a big role in the worsening adpocalypse, but not for the reason you think.
Brands like Hisense and TCL often sell their TVs at or near a loss. In order to compete with premium brands like Samsung and LG, they sell budget-friendly models below cost. The goal is for these TVs to generate revenue over its lifetime through ads and the data those TV sets send to advertisers. In a way, the person who bought a $400 TV is as much a product as the television.
YouTube’s situation is different, but it’s driven by the same logic. Google and YouTube answer to shareholders, and being profitable isn’t always the main goal. It’s to continue growing, quarter after quarter. In 2025, Google reported that YouTube made over $60 billion in revenue. And yet Wall Street is always asking “what’s next?”
YouTube has spent years watching traditional TV ad budgets and wants a larger share of them. To achieve this goal, the company has approved 30 second unskippable ads on its TV app. And yes, these ads will appear alongside the typical 6 second and 15 second ads.
What’s frustrating about these unskippable ads is that YouTube knows it’s not going to hurt their bottom line. The company’s biggest strength is the reality that there isn’t a platform offering the wide variety of content YouTube has available. They know that anyone who unsubscribes are in the minority. The rest will shell out fourteen bucks a month for YouTube Premium before they walk away.
Google knows this, so they will continue to extract as much money as they can from subscribers.
What You Can Do About All These Ads?
Unfortunately, your options to opt-out are limited, but they exist.
For Hisense TVs, press the Home button on your remote. Go to Settings and then Privacy. Look for options like Smart TV Experience, Viewing Information Services, Ad Tracking or Interest-Based Ads, and turn them off. Other smart TVs should have similar options in their respective Settings and Privacy menus.
Some users had ad features disabled by contacting Hisense support directly with their device ID. Disconnecting your TV from the internet or changing your DNS will also stop them from sending data to advertisers.
When it comes to YouTube, the only option you have is to pay for YouTube Premium. Or you could try the Premium Lite tier priced at $7.99 per month, though it won’t remove ads from YouTube Shorts or music content. Neither option is free, which is part of the problem.
A permanent fix is a mix of regulation, options that clearly spell out what we’re getting into when we buy a smart TV and blocking advertisers from getting their hands on personalized data.
Those solutions don’t exist yet, but lawsuits like the one in Texas could open the door for more restrictions. Right now, the rules that govern broadcast television just don’t apply to the screen sitting in your living room.
The truth is, none of this happened overnight. Every time we skim through the fine print, we’re saying we’re okay with our TVs tracking our usage patterns and selling it to the highest bidder. We’re agreeing to longer, unskippable ads. The TV in your living room might belong to you, but everything it learns about you belongs to advertising companies.
