- Telly promised to deliver 500,000 televisions, available for free. Spoiler: he hasn’t
- These smart TVs are free in exchange for a lot of ads and tracking
- The use of content recognition technology can be controversial
Back in 2023, we reported the launch of an unusual smart TV brand: Telly, which was going to provide 500,000 people in the US with a 55-inch 4K HDR smart TV for free. There was only one drawback and, of course, it involves advertising.
As the cliché goes, if you don’t pay for the product, then you are the product. And in the case of Telly, its free TV has a second screen that constantly displays ads and collects a lot of personal information about your viewing.
That makes it a tough sell, and it turns out the 500,000 prediction was a bit optimistic, but thousands of people have still signed up for Telly and it’s reportedly making more money from ads per user than other smart TV platforms like Roku.
How many people watch TV today?
According to a leaked investor presentation passed to TV industry expert Lowpass (via FlatpanelsHD), as of November 2025, Telly had 35,000 TVs in people’s homes, up slightly from 28,000 in the previous financial quarter, but well short of the half a million promised at launch, although the report said Telly was ordering another 110,000 TVs from its manufacturing partner, Foxconn.
Telly is reportedly generating an average of around $50 per user per quarter in advertising revenue, which is a big jump from $41 per quarter. year which Roku apparently brings.
But it also suffers from multiple problems. Lowpass reports that 10% of Telly TVs break during transport between warehouse and customer, and financing the manufacturing of its next tranche of 110,000 TVs will be a financial challenge.
There may also be a more serious challenge. Telly uses a feature called Automatic Content Recognition, ACR for short, to determine what you’re watching and tailor ads accordingly. It is far from the only company using the technology, but there are legal cases against multiple manufacturers (Hisense, LG, Samsung, Sony and TCL) regarding the use of ACR and the data it generates.
That’s partly political: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the prosecution, claims that ACR means “turning over your personal information to big tech companies or foreign adversaries,” but as DJI and TikTok can attest, politics can have a big effect on the operations of tech companies in the United States.
Since ACR is so central to its business model, I’m sure Telly is watching cases closely, because in the worst case scenario, it may never get close to the original goal of 500,000 units.
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