Smart TV home screens often include banner ads, promoted rows, recommendations, and sponsored screensavers. You usually cannot remove every ad, but you can reduce personalization and some visible clutter.
The best settings are privacy controls, ad tracking limits, viewing data toggles, and recommendation controls. The exact menu depends on the TV brand.
Does this affect you?
Use this if your Roku TV, Samsung TV, LG TV, or Vizio TV shows too many home screen ads or targeted recommendations. These steps reduce ads and tracking, but they do not redesign the built-in TV interface.
Roku: limit ad tracking and change the screensaver
- Go to Settings > Privacy > Advertising.
- Turn on Limit ad tracking.
- Go to Settings > Theme > Screen Saver.
- Choose a non-promotional screensaver such as Roku Digital Clock or Roku Photo Streams.
Roku home screen banners and promoted rows are built into Roku OS, so they cannot be removed completely. Limiting tracking stops ads from being personalized based on viewing behavior.
Samsung: turn off personalized ads
- Open Settings > General > Privacy, or All Settings > General > Privacy on newer models.
- Look for Privacy Choices, Terms & Privacy, View Privacy Policy, or an advertising section.
- Turn off Interest-Based Advertisement or Personalized advertisement.
- Also check Settings > Support > Terms & Policy for any Samsung Advertising Terms toggle.
Samsung may still show recommendations and promotional placements, but they should be less tied to your viewing history.
LG: reduce ads and content recommendations
- Open Settings > All Settings > General > System > Additional Settings, or Support > Terms of Use & Privacy on newer webOS versions.
- Find User Agreements or Advertisement.
- Enable Limit Ad Tracking if available.
- Turn off Live Plus, LG’s viewing-information feature.
- Go to General and disable Content Recommendation if your model offers it.
On LG TVs, disabling Content Recommendation can remove more visible clutter than privacy controls alone because many promoted rows come from the recommendation engine.
Vizio and external-device workarounds
On Vizio, go to Settings > System > Reset & Admin > Viewing Data and turn it off. This reduces viewing-based targeting used by Vizio’s advertising features.
No major smart TV platform lets you remove every sponsored tile or built-in recommendation row. If the home screen ads bother you, use an external streaming device such as Apple TV, a game console, Chromecast with Google TV, Roku, or Fire TV and keep the TV on that HDMI input instead of using the built-in smart TV home screen.
Sources
- Roku Support – Manage advertising preferences (2025)
- Samsung Support – Turn off personalized advertising on your Smart TV (2025)
- LG Support – Ads and Content Recommendation settings on webOS (2025)