Smart television owners in search of a bargain often overlook a crucial clause in the fine print: the manufacturer reserves the right to interrupt your viewing experience with advertisements. Hisense, the world's second-largest smart TV manufacturer, exemplifies this trend by forcing users to watch ads when switching channels, changing inputs, or navigating the home screen.
The practice reveals a fundamental shift in how the television industry operates. Rather than selling devices, manufacturers increasingly sell access to your attention. Hisense's VIDAA business, which provides the operating system software behind the electronics giant's smart TVs, has struck a deal with Nexxen to float the native "home screen" ad units shown to viewers on the latter's DSP. The business model is straightforward: subsidise hardware costs by monetising screen time.
Smart TV inventory commands higher engagement rates from viewers because they remain within the home screen menu while choosing which TV show or film to watch, with Nielsen estimating that viewers spend as long as 10.5 minutes browsing on the home screen before they decide what to watch. From an advertiser's perspective, this represents valuable real estate. From a consumer's perspective, it represents their living room.
The Industry Standard
Hisense did not invent forced television advertising. Hisense Smart TV owners are reporting a new ad placement that goes beyond the usual home-screen tiles and sponsored recommendations: a mandatory advertisement shown immediately after powering on the TV. However, the company is not alone. Roku's latest experiment is making users furious with forced ads that auto-play on startup, with the company's latest trick involving serving unskippable ads to some users the moment they start their television.
Companies are increasingly relying on ads and usage tracking to subsidise the low prices of their TV sets. The logic is economically sound: selling a television at a loss becomes tenable when you can recoup margins by selling viewer data and advertising space. Yet this business model depends on consumer acceptance of practices that would be unthinkable elsewhere.
A Coercive Choice
The problem lies not merely in the presence of ads, but in the lack of meaningful alternatives. A4 Series users often encounter persistent home screen ads and limited ad removal options in settings, with complete ad removal not officially supported, though disabling automatic content recommendations can help. For consumers seeking to avoid this altogether, the cost premium becomes prohibitive. Smart TVs are subsidised by the data collected, with no way around that, as the only way to "give it to the man" is to not connect it to the internet and use another device that is subsidised by your data.
This dynamic creates a false choice. Either accept that your television monitors and interrupts you, or forgo smart TV features altogether. Neither option aligns with what consumers reasonably expect when purchasing a modern television.
The Data Question
Advertising represents only part of the income stream. Television manufacturers increasingly rely on advertising revenue and data sales to supplement hardware profits, with modern televisions often selling at thin margins, with companies recouping costs through post-purchase data monetisation. This dependency creates an incentive structure that prioritises data extraction over user experience.
Special attention targets Hisense and TCL due to their Chinese ownership, with the Hisense complaint specifically alleging the company fails to disclose that Chinese law requires transferring collected consumer data to the People's Republic of China upon government request. Whether or not these specific allegations hold, they highlight a genuine consumer concern: the gap between what we understand manufacturers to be doing and what they actually do with our data.
A Pragmatic Path Forward
The core issue is not advertising itself, but the absence of informed consent and meaningful control. When a $500 television compels users to watch ads without a straightforward method to disable them, the manufacturer has effectively converted the device into something other than what the customer purchased. The term "smart TV" implies a device that serves the user's interests. In practice, many now serve the manufacturer's commercial interests first.
Regulatory intervention may eventually force changes. Texas alleges that Samsung "provides consumers with a one-click enrollment option" during initial setup, but that opting out requires more than 15 clicks across multiple menus, and companies' names for their automatic content recognition technology mislead consumers, with LG allegedly calling its data collection program "Viewing Information Agreement." When opting into invasive practices requires one click and opting out requires fifteen, consent becomes meaningless.
Until then, consumers face a decision that earlier television buyers never had to make: whether the cost savings justify surrendering control of the device they own.