TV owners use AI coding agents to strip ads from smart TVs

Two free projects lead. The larger, cleanyourtv, has about 5,200 stars on GitHub and gives Android and Google TV sets a menu modelled on Apple TV. Gathin T. built it after an advert on his parents’ Xiaomi TV kept getting in the way of Netflix, and he says in a post quoted by TechCrunch that a few thousand people ran his prompt on their own sets within 48 hours. The second, dumbtv, was written with Claude and DeepSeek models, and its author says it blocks the set’s own adverts and its viewing trackers. Both work without root access, meaning without breaking into the TV’s protected system files, and both can be undone. TechCrunch warns that agents can disable the wrong packages.

The trackers use automatic content recognition (ACR), which fingerprints whatever is playing by sampling the picture or the sound. TV makers earn money from that record of your viewing, selling it to advertisers or using it to aim ads on their own home screens, and TechCrunch says wider use of these hacks would put that income at risk.

For marketers buying connected TV ads, ACR audiences and home-screen reach now depend partly on how many viewers keep their sets as shipped.