Samsung investigates why its TVs put ads in others' apps

Samsung says it is investigating why some of its smart TVs are adding adverts to television programmes and films played via third-party apps.

Owners have complained of a silent ad for Pepsi interrupting playback several times an hour.

A spokeswoman for Samsung said it was only aware of the glitch affecting customers in Australia at this time. Continue..

The fault comes days after the company faced controversy over the way its TVs made use of voice recordings. We are aware of a situation that has caused some smart TV users in Australia to experience programme interruption in the form of an advertisement," the spokeswoman said.

"This seems to be caused by an error, and we are currently conducting a full and thorough investigation into the cause as our top priority.

"This situation has so far been reported only in Australia. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience experienced by our customers."

Users of at least two smart TV apps have complained about the issue:

• Plex - media centre software that allows owners to stream video files stored on a hard disk to other equipment. In most cases, the user would not expect to see any ads at all when using this
• Foxtel Play - an app installed by default on Samsung's Australian TVs, which provides access to the pay TV network's channels, which have ads of their own

News site Ars Technica noted that Samsung and Yahoo had been working together on a way to show pop-up ads on Samsung's smart TVs and suggested that the software involved might be the cause of the fault.

It said some users had been able to stop the ads appearing by rejecting a "Yahoo privacy policy" in the affected TV set's settings.