The Samsung Group is making even more waves in the media only days after being accused of having “spying Smart TVs.” Apparently, a new concern has come about as annoying and unwanted advertisements are being forcibly inserted right into video streaming applications by the Smart TVs themselves, without any type of influence from the 3rd-party providers of the apps.
The newest reports about Samsung Smart TVs claim that these latest complaints all began with a advertisement for Pepsi that began appearing while content was being streamed via Smart TV applications from both video streaming services as well as users’ personal media libraries.
Plex streaming service, which is a name brand media player device that lets its users stream their own video media from either their hard drives or personal media libraries and view it via their Smart TV, has reported having issues with the “inserted” advertisements as well.
One Plex user’s complaint reported that every 10 to 15 minutes, a Pepsi advertisement would appear while they were viewing content on their Samsung Smart TV. They went on to add that they were sometimes able to “get out” of the ad and return to their content, but at other times, the ad would freeze the user’s streaming app and force the TV to restart.
Another Plex user has reported that their Samsung Smart TV is stopping about halfway through a movie or show and showed a muted advertisement for Pepsi. They went on to add that the media streaming app does not experience the same issue when playing on other platforms such as tablets, PCs or PS4 devices.
Also, the largest provider of Pay TV in Australia, a company called Foxtel, has customers reporting similar incidents on their Samsung Smart TVs. The Pepsi ads are popping up while customers are using the Foxtel media streaming app, which is actually built into the Samsung SmartHub interface
Customers have been reporting a 16:9-sized Pepsi ad appear and takes up about ½ of their Samsung TV screen. It then freezes the Foxtel app like some sort of TV popup ad. Foxtel immediately responded to its customers and quickly escalated the issue to Samsung.
Samsung claims that the Australian ad problem the result of a Samsung TV software error due to a recent update that was “not intended for the Australian market.” The company apologized for the unintentional issue and claimed that the problem as now been rectifiedAs for the Samsung Smart TV advertising issues outside of Australia, no official comment has been made by the company as of yet.
