Developers Are Using AI to Strip Ads and Tracking from Smart TVs | Hacker News Reader

Developers Are Using AI to Strip Ads and Tracking from Smart TVs

gadgetreview.com

18 pointsthunderbong12 comments

‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167587 - October 2026

Stop buying smart TVs. Companies will stop making them if consumers stop buying them and creating a market for them. Look for commercial digital signage displays. You can find dumb TVs with nice screens or ones that just run a stock Android.

Do they sell those at Costco where normal people buy TVs?

Sure, at 4x the price

Another way to kill smart TVs is to buy them at their heavily subsidized prices and then remove all the ad malware. Companies sell those TVs cheap and recover the costs in ads and selling your data so they will lose money.

But it's still driving sales. I'm from genx and did a stint in the corporate world. The decision makers at these corporations are looking at it solely and myopically from an analytics perspective and trying to make the line go up. Make the line go down. That's how you get through to these people.

Doesn’t that line go down if I buy a TV at cost or below, and they never see further revenue because the TV sends nary so much as a byte to the mothership?

No because the units sold line goes up but the revenue per device goes down so they will look at ways to extract more money per unit, like ads

Don't get me wrong I don't disagree with what you and OP are saying in principle but at the time we do have to be realistic about the situation. These smart TVs run proprietary software stacks and hacking them to remove the ad and tracking 'features' is definitely a grievous violation of the end user license agreements.

If this trend became widespread enough to have an effect on these companies profits I would bet money the vendors would just go the legal route and crack down on it. All these LLM providers do retain logs of your sessions and these vendors would easily be able to subpoena those records. Once they start dragging people into court and mass filing cease and desist orders that's going to end it.

Look for commercial digital signage displays.

People say that while forgetting to mention that you will spend multiples more money for a lower quality viewing experience. Oh, sure, it might be 4K but it won’t have HDR and the like.

Take the subsidized TV and don’t let it anywhere near a network connection. Throw an Apple TV in front of it for streaming.

This assumes way too much about your average consumer. Most of them from talking to them seem to like their smart TVs.

For myself, I buy the smart TV and then just never connect it to the internet. Mostly because commercial digital signage is either way more expensive or is worse technology (and also more expensive).

An ad-free Android TV

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50158942

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