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.
The easiest way is to use another DNS provider that allows blacklisting.
In this example, we'll use Cisco's OpenDNS.
Go to opendns.com/ and sign up.
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.
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.
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.
Adding the full list in my dlink router's webfilter function blocked every streaming service -- youtube, hbo, netflix and prime where all blocked. I removed every entry except "samsungads.com" and added "doubleclick.net" for good measure.
Seems to work for now, and other telemetry options can be disabled directly in the tv.