Samsung’s Smart TV Now Puts Pepsi Ads in People’s Personal Videos

Call it off, everyone. We found a way in which we don’t want TV to be more like the Internet. Shut it down.

Everyone decided, universally, that popup ads are the worst thing. The person responsible for them has apologized for his crimes against humanity. Apparently Samsung missed the memo, because their new “smart TV” has been interrupting early adopters’ streaming videos with unwanted ads for Pepsi.

If you’ve got Hulu or any other ad-supported streaming service, that might not sound so unusual, but the problem is the ads are popping up where they don’t belong—including Samsung customers’ personal videos. According to Gigaom, Reddit users have reported that the ads popped up about 20-30 minutes into any movie they streamed from their person computers with the Plex media center app.

Foxtel, a paid TV streaming service in Australia, experienced similar problems, though Samsung has reportedly already fixed that issue. There’s no word on whether it has been fixed for Plex users. So far, the combined wisdom of the Internet has found that this may be a solution, though its success rate has varied:

Ads are enabled by default on recent Samsung (smart TVs) updates apparently.

To disable: press Menu on your Samsung Remote and scroll to Smart Hub > Terms & Policy > Yahoo Privacy Policy. Scroll to “I disagree with the Yahoo Privacy Notice.” and you can toggle the option on to opt-out.

We were just recovering from the telescreen smart TV news, and now this? As usual, I think I’ll take my TV as dumb as I can get it, thank you very much.

(via PC World)

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Dan Van Winkle

Dan Van Winkle (he) is an editor and manager who has been working in digital media since 2013, first at now-defunct Geekosystem (RIP), and then at The Mary Sue starting in 2014, specializing in gaming, science, and technology. Outside of his professional experience, he has been active in video game modding and development as a hobby for many years. He lives in North Carolina with Lisa Brown (his wife) and Liz Lemon (their dog), both of whom are the best, and you will regret challenging him at Smash Bros.

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