Smart TVs have become the default consumer television, bundling apps, internet browsing, personalised advertising, and data tracking into every set sold. The trade-off was supposed to be convenience — streaming access baked into the hardware. Instead, the additional features reportedly slow down the TVs themselves, creating a product that degrades over time as manufacturers layer on more software overhead to serve more ads. The Guardian is now soliciting responses from viewers who have taken matters into their own hands: disconnecting smart TVs from wifi, stripping back features, or deliberately purchasing older "dumb" models that do one thing well. The callout also seeks people who exclusively use terrestrial broadcasts and those who still pay for a black and white TV licence fee — a relic of the UK's licensing structure that persists as a cost-saving measure. The structural dynamic here is straightforward. TV manufacturers discovered that the hardware sale is not where the money is — the post-purchase revenue stream from advertising and data is. This creates a perverse incentive: the more software bloat, the more ad inventory and tracking surface area. The consumer paid full price for the set but now hosts an advertising platform in their living room that actively degrades the device's core function. Consumer responses fall into three tiers of resistance. The lightest touch — disconnecting from wifi — neutralises the data pipeline but sacrifices streaming. Mid-tier users are hunting for older models that predate the ad-subsidy era. The most committed have retreated to terrestrial broadcast entirely, opting out of the entire digital television ecosystem. What makes this interesting is that it is not organised protest or regulatory pressure. It is individual friction response — people solving a product problem the manufacturer created on purpose. The fact that "how to speed up your smart TV" guides exist at all is an indictment: the product ships with built-in drag that users must actively remove. The UK's black and white TV licence fee (£53 vs £169.50 for colour as of recent rates) offers a peculiar escape valve. Some households reportedly use it as a legitimate cost reduction, though the practical reality of finding and maintaining a black and white set in 2026 makes this more curiosity than trend. The deeper question is whether the smart TV model — hardware subsidised by post-purchase extraction — is sustainable when a visible minority of consumers are actively degrading the product to escape the extraction. If the ad-subsidy model requires universal connectivity to work, every disconnected set is a defection that pressures the business model from below.
