Be happy they're only showing you ads and not implanting malware into your network or turning it into a residential proxy.

TVs are now a commodity that competes almost solely on price. You can walk into most big box stores in North America and buy a TV that will display at a higher resolution than your eyes are physically capable of processing at the distance of the average living room, have a screen bigger than the average person's wingspan, and it'll cost well under $500. If you don't keep the price low you're going to lose sales. Since you're not making cash on the front-end, you make it by selling the ad space.

Everyone who could want a TV more-or-less has one. You either cut quality so they have to buy 'em more often, or you monetize what's already there. They're probably doing both, but this is an example of the latter.

I presume the same mind thought this up.

They're a customer already if they're opening the home screen and they probably already mounted it on their wall so fuck them. Show them ads. Also turn on the microphone in the background (what my Hisense tv does).

It'd be trivial for them to introduce some sort of network connectivity check that would need to be completed before audiovisual signals come out of the device.

I'm pretty sure they already have that in the pipeline. Why wouldn't they?

Ignoring, of course, that no implementation has ever been observed in the wild, for purposes malicious or otherwise.

It’s called an idiot box for a reason.

My life has improved dramatically without one.

And at last, the market has finally caught up with me :)