Fed up With Smart TV Ads, People Are Using AI To Remove Them and Take Back Control

A sponsored advert appeared before Gathin T.'s parents could reach Netflix on their television. He gave Claude Code the model number and asked it to change the experience, later sharing a new home screen with their apps.

'Vibe coded my parents' TV this afternoon!' he wrote in a 17 October post. What began as a household fix became CleanYourTV, a shared project for people using coding assistants to strip unwanted software and home-screen advertising from supported televisions.

A Fix for One Family Becomes a Shared Project

Gathin published the prompt behind the changes, giving other owners a starting point. In an account reproduced by TechCrunch, he says a few thousand people tried changing their own televisions over the following two days. That is his account of the response, rather than an independently verified adoption figure.

The project turns the original experiment into instructions others can adapt. Contributors share device-specific information and fixes, helping the next person with similar hardware avoid repeating every investigation.

The coding assistant works through existing Android debugging tools. CleanYourTV's documentation describes disabling selected packages and installing a launcher—the software behind the television's home screen. The packages remain installed, with restoration tools provided to undo changes.

For owners, the visible result is a different route to their apps and inputs. The project asks which apps they use and which features they want to retain, rather than assume everyone wants the same stripped-down set. Its target is the television interface and unwanted software, not every advert inside streamed content.

Other Owners Try Changing Their Own Screens

Muzzammil Yasin Sabuwala describes a similar frustration. He tells TechCrunch that advertising and the difficulty of getting directly to the content he wanted led him to build dumbtv, a separate project for simplifying the television experience.

His approach also gives other owners work they can reuse. He suggests pointing an AI agent at the project's repository and says he intends to maintain it, adding support for more models over time.

Ryan Doyle takes a more direct route. In the publication's account of his experiment, he sends Claude Code his television listing and asks, 'Can you hack this?' He says the assistant guides him through changes that remove unwanted software, customise the screensaver and improve the lagging interface.

In a subsequent post, Doyle demonstrates how the television responds after the changes. He attributes the improvement to Claude removing unwanted software; the demonstration is a participant's account, not a controlled speed comparison.

Other participants describe their own results. Mihir Gupta says an afternoon with Claude Code leaves 25 unwanted apps disabled and replaces the stock launcher with a smaller custom one. These are individual reports of changes, rather than proof that every television will respond the same way.

Owners Choose Which Features to Keep

The television's software determines what is possible. CleanYourTV documents both cleanup and launcher support for Android TV and Google TV, but narrower support for Fire TV. Samsung's Tizen and LG's webOS require separate approaches.

Not every experiment succeeds. The reporting includes one person's account of an unusable Android TV and another whose Fire TV modification stalls halfway through. No failure rate is established.

Taylor Lorenz sees the activity as a potential shift in power towards users. The projects give that argument practical examples: owners choose a home screen and decide whether to retain voice assistance, casting and updates.

Those choices can remove conveniences too. CleanYourTV's documentation notes that disabling an assistant can mean losing the remote's microphone button or voice search inside apps.