​You're Going to Need an Ad Blocker for Your Next TV

Smart TVs are evidently so smart they can tell what’s playing on the screen and show you pop-up ads based on what you watch. So discovered security researcher Paul McMillan while watching Inglorious Basterds on his Samsung smart TV: one minute into the movie, an Army recruitment ad popped up on the screen. Pop-up ads on Samsung and other smart TVs have been discovered before. But the weird thing here is that the TV can seemingly recognize any input you play through it, and add ads on top. What’s more, the ads may be targeted based on content recognition, a sort of built-in Shazam for ads.

McMillan was watching the movie through an Amazon Fire set top box, and as an experiment, tried playing it from his computer connected to the TV through an HDMI cable. In both cases the Army ad appeared at the one-minute mark, leading McMillan to deduce that the ad was being served by Samsung, and that the internet-connected TV was using content recognition to show ads on top of any video coming in through the TV’s input. This seems to be a brand new kind of targeted advertising, McMillan said. “In this case, it seems to be running some kind of watermarking or audio recognition system on top of anything that’s playing,” he said.