[Phillips126]

Like you I also had a mid/high range Samsung TV. The ads were not as obtrusive being only on the bottom left of the menu bar, but its the ACR that I needed to get away from.

> Samsung Smart TVs have built-in Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology that can understand viewing behavior and usage including programs, movies, ads, gaming content and OTT apps in real-time.[0]

Literally every second or two, Samsung was performing some screen reading data collection and sending it off to their servers. My Pi Hole was capturing 12,000 blocked requests from this per day (6-7 hours of shared family viewing). This resulted in a poor user experience where I would feel the actually latency when trying to navigate around or open the menu. After factory resetting my TV it was so snappy again. Plugged in an AppleTV and haven't looked back. This form of advertising is incredibly invasive and disgusting to me, with constant spying/screenshotting of the content I am viewing.

[0] https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/tv-...