- Telly promised to deliver 500,000 TVs, available for free. Spoiler: it hasn't
- These smart TVs are free in exchange for high numbers of ads and tracking
- Use of content recognition tech can be controversial
Way 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 just one catch, and of course it involves advertising.
As the cliché goes, if you're not paying for the product then you are the product. And in the case of Telly, your free TV has a second screen that permanently displays ads, and it collects quite a lot of personal information about your viewing.
That makes it a hard sell, and it turns out that 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 such as Roku.
How many people are watching their Telly today?
According to a leaked investor presentation that's been passed to TV industry expert Lowpass (via FlatpanelsHD), as of November 2025 Telly had 35,000 sets in people's homes – slightly up from the 28,000 in the previous financial quarter, but far short of the half million promised at launch – although the report did say that Telly was ordering another 110,000 TVs from its manufacturing partner, Foxconn.
Telly is apparently bringing in an average of around $50 per user per quarter from ad revenue, which is a huge jump on the $41 per year that Roku apparently brings in.
But it's also suffering from multiple issues. Lowpass reports that 10% of Telly TVs are breaking in transit between the warehouse and the customer, and funding the manufacture of its next tranche of 110,000 TVs is going to be a financial challenge.
There may be a more serious challenge too. Telly uses a feature called Automatic Content Recognition, ACR for short, to work out what you're watching and tailor ads accordingly. It's far from the only firm to use the tech, 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's Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the charge, claims that ACR means "surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries" – but as DJI and TikTok can both attest, politics can have a big effect on tech firms' operations in the US.
With ACR so central to its business model, I'm sure Telly is watching the cases closely – because in the worst case, it might never even get close to the original 500,00-unit goal.
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Source: TechRadar
