Smart TVs and adverts

(this is an update of a previous post)

Ad blockers work well on PCs and other things, smartphones included. But what about your TV?

Some time ago our Samsung SmartTV had a software update after which it started displaying rather infuriating adverts in the TV guide. It has shown ads before in the list of apps and things but not in the guide. And in a glaring colour scheme too so it really stood out.

I tried blocking various domains via the broadband router as was suggested in forums, but this was not successful. privacy settings at that time also offered little hope. On that particular subject, the privacy settings on the TV were set in a way to trip one up in my opinion. One could de-select advertising partners one by one (they are all on by default and there is no global turn-off option) but if one strayed outside the box or clicked the wrong thing the whole process was abandoned. And on entry to the options ‘Allow all’ was preselected. there are hundreds of advertising partners too.

Consent was confusing as well. The list seemed to suggest that consent had been given but on entry to that section it was then possible consent, the unticked box presumably meaning consent had not been given (nor would it have been!)

The TV was not a cheap model and I really did not expect advertising in this way. In the end I installed pi-hole which 'cured' the advertising issue in the TV guide. It is interesting to note that the default block list that comes with pi-hole included all the relevant Samsung domains so no other settings were required in order to achieve this aim.