How to Remove Ads From a Smart TV
An unofficial walkthrough of every real way to remove ads from a smart TV's home screen: cleanyourtv for Android TV and Google TV, DNS-level blocking for every brand, and the option of skipping the smart part entirely.
Updated October 20, 2026 · Unofficial guide
If you turn on your TV and see a sponsored tile before you can even open Netflix, you're not imagining it: modern smart TV platforms treat the home screen as ad inventory, not just app shortcuts. Removing ads from a smart TV means something different depending on the brand and on where the ad actually lives, so this page goes through every option in order of how much it actually fixes, starting with the one that does the most on the TVs it supports.
Why your smart TV shows ads in the first place
Android TV and Google TV manufacturers ship a recommendation engine and an ad service alongside the stock launcher, and that's what populates the sponsored rows, "Discover" nags and promoted tiles you see before opening an app. It's also what's sending viewing data back for ad targeting in many cases. This is a software layer sitting on top of the OS, not something baked unavoidably into the hardware, which is why it's possible to remove ads from a smart TV without replacing the TV.
Option 1: cleanyourtv, for Android TV and Google TV
If your smart TV runs Android TV or Google TV, this is the most direct way to remove ads from its home screen. cleanyourtv is an open-source project that connects to the TV over Wi-Fi ADB, disables the manufacturer's telemetry, ad-serving and recommendation-row packages with pm disable-user, and installs a small Apple-TV-style launcher in place of the stock one. Nothing is uninstalled and nothing is rooted, so it's fully reversible.
The practical way to run it is with the cleanyourtv prompt, pasted into Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI with your TV model filled in. The assistant finds the TV on your network, backs it up, sorts installed packages into telemetry, ad services, background bloat and streaming apps, and disables the first categories after checking with you on anything you might use. With the project's repo cloned as context, the whole process to remove ads from a smart TV's home screen takes about fifteen minutes.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| Connect | ADB over Wi-Fi, port 5555, after enabling USB debugging in Developer options |
| Back up | Full package and settings snapshot, so a restore script can undo it |
| Debloat | Ad and telemetry packages disabled in small batches, screenshotted between each |
| Launcher | A ~300 KB native launcher (com.gathin.tvhome) replaces the stock, ad-carrying one |
80 tested debloat lists across 28 brands already exist for this; check the TV list before running the discovery step from scratch, and see brand pages such as TCL, Xiaomi, Sony and Hisense for what's already known about that brand's ad packages. For a deeper walkthrough of the Android TV side specifically, see debloating Android TV and debloating Google TV.
Option 2: Private DNS ad blocking, which works on any Android TV or Google TV set, cleaned or not
Separately from cleanyourtv's debloat step, Android 9 and newer lets you point the TV's Private DNS at an ad-blocking resolver. This blocks ad and tracker domains at the network level, system-wide, across every app, not just the home screen, and it survives reboots without any ADB session staying open. The cleanyourtv project documents it as an optional extra using AdGuard DNS:
adb shell settings put global private_dns_specifier dns.adguard-dns.com
adb shell settings put global private_dns_mode hostnameOr, using cleanyourtv's own Python ADB client, which avoids macOS's "No route to host" block on the stock adb binary:
tools/tv.py 'settings put global private_dns_specifier dns.adguard-dns.com'
tools/tv.py 'settings put global private_dns_mode hostname'settings put global private_dns_mode opportunistic.
Samsung and LG: cleanyourtv doesn't reach these, here's what does
cleanyourtv debloats over ADB, and Samsung's Tizen and LG's webOS don't expose the same shell access Android TV does, so cleanyourtv is not a way to remove ads from a Samsung or LG smart TV's home screen. (A community webOS port for LG exists as a separate side project, listed in the cleanyourtv repo's SHOWCASE.md, but it's an independent build by another contributor, not something this guide covers in depth.) On Samsung and LG, two things actually move the needle:
- Built-in ad-personalization settings. Samsung TVs generally have a Privacy Choices or Terms & Privacy menu where you can turn off "Viewing Information Services" and "Interest-Based Advertisements" and reset the advertising ID; LG TVs have a similar toggle for "Live Plus" content recognition and "Limit Ad Tracking" under Additional Settings. Menu wording and location shift between firmware versions, so check your TV's current Settings → Privacy or Settings → Support menu for the closest match. These settings reduce ad targeting; manufacturers are explicit that they don't remove all ads from the smart TV, only personalized ones.
- Network-level DNS blocking, covered next, which works regardless of the TV's OS since it filters at the router or a DNS server, not on the TV itself.
Option 3: network-level ad blocking for every smart TV, any brand
If you'd rather set ad blocking up once for your whole network instead of per device, a self-hosted DNS filter does the same job as the Private DNS trick above but covers every smart TV, phone and tablet on your Wi-Fi at once:
- Pi-hole, run on a Raspberry Pi or any always-on machine, filters DNS for your whole LAN and gives you a dashboard of what's being blocked.
- NextDNS is a hosted equivalent: no hardware to run, configured once on your router or on each device.
- AdGuard Home is a self-hosted option similar to Pi-hole, with its own blocklist management.
Point your router's DNS at whichever you choose, or set it per device the way the Private DNS steps above do for Android TV specifically, and every smart TV on the network, Samsung, LG, Android or otherwise, gets the same filtering without touching the TV's own settings.
Option 4: make the smart TV dumb on purpose
The most reliable way to remove ads from a smart TV's home screen is to stop using that home screen. Two ways to do this:
- Plug in an external streaming box, an Apple TV, NVIDIA Shield or Google TV Streamer, set it as the default input, and leave the TV on that HDMI port permanently. The smart TV's own OS, and its ads, stay dormant behind the input selector.
- Don't connect the TV to the internet at all. Without a network connection, a smart TV's ad and recommendation services have nothing to phone home to or pull sponsored content from; it behaves as a plain display for whatever's plugged into HDMI.
This is the blunt-force option when a TV's platform makes targeted debloating impractical, or when you'd rather not touch Developer options at all.
Putting it together
In short: if the smart TV runs Android TV or Google TV, run the cleanyourtv prompt to remove ads from its home screen directly, then layer Private DNS on top for in-app ad domains. If it's Samsung or LG, use the TV's own ad-personalization settings plus a network-level DNS blocker. And if none of that is worth the effort, an external streaming box sidesteps the smart TV's ads entirely. If you try cleanyourtv and want to undo it, see restoring your TV; for the full debloat walkthrough, see debloating Android TV or debloating Fire TV.