How to stop adverts appearing on your Samsung TV

guide.md

I'm getting adverts in my TV's UI, help!

Samsung's otherwise excellent 2016 range of UHD TVs received an update that added advertisements to the UI. This has been complained about at great length on Samsung's forums and repeatedly, Samsung have refused to add an option to remove them.

The ads interrupt the clean UI of the TV and are invasive. Here's an example of how they look:

This guide was originally posted on Samsung's TV forums but unfortunately, that site is a super-slow and barely accessible unusable mess.

Ok, so how do I get rid of them?

The easiest way is to use another DNS provider that allows blacklisting.

In this example, we'll use Cisco's OpenDNS.

Step One - Signing up

Go to opendns.com/ and sign up.

Step Two - Creating the blacklist

Once you've signed up and are logged into OpenDNS, head to your network's settings and find the 'Web Content Filtering' section. Here is the list of domains that I have identified, we're going to add them one-by-one to the block list, detailed under Manage Individual Domains. This list contains everything Samsung-related, but at the very minimum block samsungads.com.

config.samsungads.com
gpm.samsungqbe.com
log-config.samsungacr.com
samsung.com
samsungacr.com
samsungads.com
samsungcloudsolution.com
samsungcloudsolution.net
samsungotn.net

Simply ensure Always Block is selected, paste the domain into the box and click Add Domain.

Step Three - Configuring your TV

Now we're nearly there, we just need to tell the TV to use OpenDNS rather than your ISP's default.

In the settings section, hit 'Network Status', your TV should check some things for a couple of seconds before showing you a screen that looks something like this:

Select IP Settings and configure the DNS server to point at 208.67.222.222 or 208.67.220.220.

Step Four - Make sure it's working

If everything went to plan, you should no longer see ads in your Hub Bar. It is possible that some ads are cached on your TV and may remain for a while, but once they expire and disappear they shouldn't come back.

This is a hack. Imagine having to do that for your Samsung washing machine because it forces you to watch a 30-second laundry detergent ad before letting you start a load; or your Samsung smart refrigerator that forces you to watch an ad for "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!"before allowing you access to your shopping list? A better solution may be to install a separate, cheap wifi router just for your Samsung device network. Set up the ad blockers on it, and only connect Samsung devices to it.

The best solution is to return that Samsung TV while you still can. If you are outside of the return window like I am, then this router hack is something you can do if you have the desire to. It just angers the hell out of me that we are discussing hacks like this for devices we paid upward of TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR!

WE OWN THESE TELEVISIONS! The fact that we can't disable ads like this is maddening.

Let this be a lesson to those of you who haven't yet bought a Samsung TV or other appliance. DON'T!

I agree, people who experience this on their new TV should absolutely return them.

For those of us who received an update after months of ownership, this will have to do.

I also agree - returning TV would be the best - but I'm in your position of it being too old as well - so please accept my thanks for posting a fix that seems to work great.
I've said "seems to work" because I've had a false dawn before after removing all consent agreements on the TV which stopped the annoying ads for a bit.... time will tell....

Hey, thanks for this list. It certainly helped block ads on the Samsung TV. However, blocking all of these URLs seems to stop BBC Iplayer and other apps from working. Netflix / Amazon Prime Video still work. It's weird.

Does anyone know what most of these URLS do? None of them resolve in a web browser.

In particular, I just really want to block TV Plus (which plays adverts full screen when you turn on the TV) as it shows inappropriate adverts for my kids during daytime hours. Like Hacksaw Ridge at 11am.

Assuming your router supports this, you can also use Parental Controls to Block specific sites.

https://www.linksys.com/in/support-article?articleNum=140978

@mrflib samsungads.com does resolve to a login page. I haven't tested the other ones.

That's odd @mrflib, iPlayer and Amazon work for me with these settings in place.

I'm unfamiliar with TVPlus, but my opinion of Samsung is still plummeting.

Firstly thanks for providing this, it's certainly worked for me.

Secondly I suspect that one of the URLs on the blocklist is responsible for apps updating, or at least some sort of handshake. I've had YouTube throw 400 errors recently, and the only way to resolve has been to briefly disable parental controls on the router (which only contain the Samsung URLs on a block list).

I've turned off automatic updating on the TV and I'll see if that stops the problem. Otherwise it might just be a case of going through the URLs one by one until I find the culprit.

Thanks @PhonoPaul, you're certainly right. I just listed evening vaguely Samsungy that the TV tried to connect to. I'd guess that just blocking samsungads.com is enough, but as Samsung enabled the ads via a software update I'm happy to not receive any further "upgrades".

I can confirm that only blocking samsungsads.com works for now. Interestingly, the url forwards to samsungtvads.com.

Curiously an advert for the S9 has appeared over the weekend. Checking my blocklist I had all the listed URLs except samsung.com and samsungcloudsolution.com present. I've added them back now, but I can conclude that this particular ad didn't come from samsungads.com.

I tried only blocking the urls that had ads in them but it wasn't enough. I kept getting Sling TV and Hulu ad tiles show up on the menu bar which totally aggravates me because I have to click over them when switching inputs.

Now I'm worried I won't get updates for my TV because if the aggressive blocking. Why can't they just let us turn ads off?

Here's a list of all the domains that my TV has attempted to contact (between 2018-03-20 and 2018-04-03) based on a report downloaded from OpenDNS. If some ads are sneaking through, I can revise the list in the tutorial. I only have ads.samsungads.com blocked at the moment and I've seen no ads.

Domain	Count
5568	log-ingestion-eu.samsungacr.com
2010	lcprd1.samsungcloudsolution.net
237	osb-apps.samsungqbe.com
166	acr0.samsungcloudsolution.com
148	ads.samsungads.com
135	www.samsungotn.net
101	osb.samsungqbe.com
86	cdn.samsungcloudsolution.com
84	www.samsungrm.net
64	osb-eusvc.samsungqbe.com
59	oempprd.samsungcloudsolution.com
58	time.samsungcloudsolution.com
51	noticecdn.samsungcloudsolution.com
51	notice.samsungcloudsolution.com
45	otn.samsungcloudcdn.com
29	multiscreen.samsung.com
29	gpm.samsungqbe.com
29	configprd.samsungcloudsolution.net
24	ypu.samsungelectronics.com
19	kpu.samsungelectronics.com
11	sas.samsungcloudsolution.com
10	otnprd9.samsungcloudsolution.net
10	otnprd8.samsungcloudsolution.net
5	otnprd11.samsungcloudsolution.net
5	otnprd10.samsungcloudsolution.net
1	apps.samsungcloudcdn.com

@peteryates thanks for this info. Why the DNS route and not just using your own routers parental controls?

@SolidlyStated either approach will work fine, as would installing a Pi-Hole on your network.

The reason I wrote the instructions using OpenDNS was that they would work for everyone. Lots of people don't know how to log into their router and not all routers support parental controls, and those that do will have different interfaces and options - making it a much bigger and more complex set of instructions.

I'll happily link to any alternative workarounds in the tutorial's introduction, though.

Thanks for the write up. How do you know which DNS value to use when connecting the TV? I've seen another ad pop up, but it could easily have been cached. Basically, is there some other way I can test this without just waiting and seeing? The ads itself don't really bother me, but it ruins trying to set up harmony commands as the number of "DirectionRights" varies as I want to launch smartapps (Samsung/Logitech Harmony should really just have built in commands to launch the smartapps...)

well, disregard my previous post, I found the DNS info on opendns.com, however, my samsung TV lost internet connection a day later and required going back to the automatic DNS. Any ideas why? Going through either DNS I can't get internet access on the TV anymore.

Thanks all, just adding ads.samsungads.com to blocked list of parental controls for my router did the trick 👍

There are other methods. One of them is to use your router to block the advertisement, not necessary have to subscript to service provider.
google to find out more : https://tinyurl.com/y87fu36m

Yes @BlueCat0268, any method you can think of that prevents HTTP requests from your TV to ads.samsungads.com will work. Whether it's a using a DNS blacklist like I describe above, which will work for everyone regardless of which router they have, or a more-custom solution. I now use a Pi Hole and it blocks all ads on my home network without any further effort from me.

It's the suggestion I'd now make, however, it's a bit more of an involved process to set up than just making your TV use OpenDNS.

@darroj When I used the OpenDNS method my TV's "am I connected to the internet" screen didn't work, but it still managed to play YouTube, Prime and BBC services just fine. It may vary from model to model, but if your router supports blocking domains via parental controls you can try that too.

@peteryates i have blocked the variants of samsungads.com and I am still seeing ads. It seemed to go away for a single viewing but came back in full force. I also tried blocking the entire list listed above which stopped my account from connecting to the tv but did not stop the ads. Is there anything else I can try? Btw, I am using an ASUS router and blocking via this device.

@muckinstein - blocking via the router should work providing your TV is connecting to the internet via it. I'd test this myself but my router doesn't have any URL-blocking options.

I suggest trying to see how successfully your router is actually blocking connections to that domain. Turn the rule off, try to access ads.samsungads.com and then comparing the results to when the rule is on.

Also, I suggest testing out the DNS method specified in my original post and seeing whether or not it works. Rather than doing it on your TV it's quicker to test with your computer.

Using my ISP's DNS servers I get the following result with HTTPie:

$ http get https://ads.samsungads.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Sun, 03 Nov 2019 11:58:04 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 00:18:52 GMT

And with OpenDNS's with the blacklist enabled:

$ http get https://ads.samsungads.com

http: error: SSLError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='ads.samsungads.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded
with url: / (Caused by SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate
verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1076)'))) while doing GET request
to URL: https://ads.samsungads.com/

I would expect similar results if you were to try the same thing.

@muckinstein - blocking via the router should work providing your TV is connecting to the internet via it. I'd test this myself but my router doesn't have any URL-blocking options.

I suggest trying to see how successfully your router is actually blocking connections to that domain. Turn the rule off, try to access ads.samsungads.com and then comparing the results to when the rule is on.

Also, I suggest testing out the DNS method specified in my original post and seeing whether or not it works. Rather than doing it on your TV it's quicker to test with your computer.

Thank you for the reply. I have managed to block this through my Netgear router which happens to use OpenDNS. What I believe may have been happening is that samsungads.com was redirecting to samsung.com/us/business/samsungads which was allowing the ads to come through.

Thanks, simple to do, took me less than 5 minutes, only blocking domains with ads in it. I'll see how it goes. They've been getting more aggressive lately since a firmware update.

Just got a new TV today only to discover Samsung's sleazy ads can't be disabled. I doubt I'll talk my wife into returning it after the ordeal we had installing it, so I'm very thankful for this thread.

I followed the instructions here starting by blocking all of the listed domains. The ads are gone! However, at this point, only the Netflix app works. The others (e.g. spotify, youtube) report network errors and are unusable. Has anyone else experienced this? I imagine a new Samsung update to disable any TV that can't access ads or provide telemetry?

Paring the list down to just: samsungacr.com and samsungads.com seems to be working for now. Has anyone worked out more precisely what's the best list to block?

I just blocked the following regex patterns on my firewall, Spotify, Youtube, and Disney+ apps still work fine.

.*samsung.*
.*bixby.*
.*doubleclick.*

With exceptions for the following FQDNs
frametv.samsungcloudcdn.com
lcprd1.samsungcloudsolution.net

Those two are required in order to download and save artwork to the Frame TV. If you do not have a Frame TV, then you probably don't need them.
These patterns also block the app store, but you can just disable the filter if you need to download an app, which I don't do very often.

Its holy shit! So shame on Samsung. Could we sue them?

An even better and easy way to do it is through your Home internet router's content filter. For most routers it is in the Firewall or Web filter section. Some routers have this setting in the Parental control section.
You simply need to access the Router configuration page and login as Admin. Here are some default router config URLs for popular brands:
LinkSys Router: http://192.168.1.1
Netgear / D-Link Router: http://192.168.0.1
ASUS Router: http://192.168.50.1/
Belkin Router: http://192.168.2.1
AT&T Router: http://192.168.1.254
Comcast Router: http://10.0.0.1
Same can be done for other brands including Sony, LG and Roku. Here's a step-by-step procedure with links to block for each brand.

I've blocked these for my Samsung The Frame using OpenDNS and ads are gone.

RANK | DOMAIN | REASON | REQUESTS
-- | -- | -- | --
1 | tvx.adgrx.com | Blacklist | 120
2 | events.samsungads.com | Blacklist | 72
3 | config.samsungads.com | Blacklist | 24
4 | static.doubleclick.net | Blacklist | 4

Cheap move, Samsung! Focus on washing machines and stay out of my digital life!