Samsung Smart TVs, Now With Interstit—Nothing Beats the Refreshing Taste of Pepsi—ial Ads ⇥ gigaom.com

Janko Roettgers, GigaOm:

Thought you could watch that video on your local hard drive without ads? Think again: A number of owners of Samsung’s smart TVs are reporting this week that their TV sets started to interrupt their movie viewing with Pepsi ads, which seem to be dynamically inserted into third-party content.

“Every movie I play 20-30 minutes in it plays the pepsi ad, no audio but crisp clear ad. It has happened on 6 movies today,” a user reported on Reddit, where a number of others were struggling with the same problem.

Samsung insists this is a bug, but why does the code for this exist in the first place? Sure, TVs are a low-margin product, but forcing ads into the middle of viewers’ videos seems like a rather on-the-nose way of admitting that.