How To Disable Samsung Smart TV SyncPlus Pop-Ups?

[dag625]

I have had a Samsung UN40ES6100F Smart TV for a couple years now and have been more or less happy with it. Besides normal cable TV, I basically just use the Netflix app and things have worked fine until this evening (4/13/2015).

While watching cable television this evening I started having the TV signal interrupted by a screen labeled SyncPlus, which is apparently some kind of Samsung ad service. It seems to want me to agree to their terms of service for SyncPlus, which I do not want to do. There is no explicit option for disagreeing to the terms of service, only a check box which can be selected to agree. I can exit out of it with my remote but it will pop back up after a minute or two. When it pops up both the video and audio from cable TV are completely blocked. It does not seem to interrupt me if I'm using the Smart TV features.

Does anyone know how to disable these interruptions? The TV was not giving me these interruptions as of last night, I have no interest in this service, and I'd rather not agree to the terms of service as from what I can tell it also involves some amount of data collection. Any advice is most appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Wayne_21]

I just got off the phone with Samsung tech support They told me they have an outage and the enginers are working on developing a permanent fix. IN the mean time he told me to do the following.
Go to menu; smarthub; reset smarthub; unplug tv for 1 minute;
It's been 5 minutes and the tv is working fine.

 

[Lin_2_]

Wayne_21, thanks for posting. Tried what you said and working fine. Menu, smarthub, RESET smarthub, unplug TV. Of course these days "unplugging TV" can be quite a nightmare (85 inch TV on the wall). haha. Great forum, would NEVER have figured this out.

 

[btaymb]

So unhappy right now. My husband is out of town, and I can't get to the plug behind the huge TV that is mounted flat against the wall. I followed all of the other steps, but can't complete this last one without probably having the TV come crashing to the ground :-(

 

[PaulGor]

I bet there's some kind of signal coming in over the internet telling the TV to display the thing.

It was my guess, too - so I unplugged my Ethernet internet cable. Still the same! So this is inside TV - due to some recent was firmware update...

So I plan to follow the advice to re-set SmartHub (I've disabled those items the very first day I've got the TV) and then unplug the power for 2 minutes

 

[Katie_15]

https/www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFy_Ev8EjhA

I believe it always better to visually observe settings being changed than trying to explain it because I might say go to your Smarthub manager and you might not know what I am talking about. If your tv has voice recognition and it irritates you, disable that while you are in there.

Unfortunately I've tried that. My issue is not that I'm getting ads but that the SyncPlus settings/opt-in screen (e.g. the screen shows at ~0:44 in the video you linked) keeps popping up every couple of minutes. From what I can tell in my settings SyncPlus is "off" and it appears that I don't have "Agree" checked for either the Yahoo or SyncPlus terms and conditions.

I've never had issues with this until last night. I hadn't really heard of SyncPlus until last night. The TV is several years old at this point (I know I've read that newer TVs seem to opt you in by default) and has not exhibited this behavior until last night.

 

[Wayne_21]

To the people who are unable to unplug the TV because of its location--
you may want to turn off the circuit breaker. As a last resort you may want to throw the main circuit breaker. Needless you say you will have reset all of your clocks etc but at least you will be able to watch TV.
Good luck.

 

[Halecsu]

Hey did you ever figure out how to disable this annoying sync plus screen that pops up every couple minutes?

 

[Chris_240]

So I'm at the snart hub terms and services in the setup and its not allowing me to continue without having all of them checked. Anyone know anything aboit this?

 

[Wayne_21]

See my previous Post.....
I just got off the phone with Samsung tech support They told me they have an outage and the enginers are working on developing a permanent fix. IN the mean time he told me to do the following.
Go to menu; smarthub; reset smarthub; unplug tv for 1 minute;
It's been 5 minutes and the tv is working fine.
Update--it's been approximately 10 hours.

 

[Gary2019]

What a complete nuisance. This started happening to me last night and nothing I did worked. This tutorial seems to be working. I went through the steps, turned the TV off, and unplugged it for 20 seconds. So far so good - no annoying popups

 

[Matthew_113]

https/www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFy_Ev8EjhA

I believe it always better to visually observe settings being changed than trying to explain it because I might say go to your Smarthub manager and you might not know what I am talking about. If your tv has voice recognition and it irritates you, disable that while you are in there.

Unfortunately I've tried that. My issue is not that I'm getting ads but that the SyncPlus settings/opt-in screen (e.g. the screen shows at ~0:44 in the video you linked) keeps popping up every couple of minutes. From what I can tell in my settings SyncPlus is "off" and it appears that I don't have "Agree" checked for either the Yahoo or SyncPlus terms and conditions.

I've never had issues with this until last night. I hadn't really heard of SyncPlus until last night. The TV is several years old at this point (I know I've read that newer TVs seem to opt you in by default) and has not exhibited this behavior until last night.

Weird, my Samsung just started doing the exact same thing. Disabling SyncPlus didn't help so I unplugged the TV for a few seconds, looks like that did the trick.

 

[Adirondacks]

This started out of the blue last night after I'd been watching Netflix. I tried the disabling. That didn't change anything. Today I came back here again and found out about unplugging. That was 10 minutes ago and it seems to be okay now. Hopefully it will stay that way.

 

[Melissa_978]

Ours starting doing it AGAIN! Grrrrrrrr. I wonder if Netflix has something to do with it b/c it is a smart TV and we use Netflix constantly!

 

[Toxygene]

I have had a Samsung UN40ES6100F Smart TV for a couple years now and have been more or less happy with it. Besides normal cable TV, I basically just use the Netflix app and things have worked fine until this evening (4/13/2015).

While watching cable television this evening I started having the TV signal interrupted by a screen labeled SyncPlus, which is apparently some kind of Samsung ad service. It seems to want me to agree to their terms of service for SyncPlus, which I do not want to do. There is no explicit option for disagreeing to the terms of service, only a check box which can be selected to agree. I can exit out of it with my remote but it will pop back up after a minute or two. When it pops up both the video and audio from cable TV are completely blocked. It does not seem to interrupt me if I'm using the Smart TV features.

Does anyone know how to disable these interruptions? The TV was not giving me these interruptions as of last night, I have no interest in this service, and I'd rather not agree to the terms of service as from what I can tell it also involves some amount of data collection. Any advice is most appreciated.

Thanks.

I was able to stop the popup by going into the Smart Hub Apps and locating the SyncPlus app. I then long pressed the enter button on the remote. It gives you the option to move the app, reinstall, and view the details of the app. I chose to have it reinstall the app and since doing that, it no longer pops up like it did before. The weird part is this didn't start happening until I came back to my house and my TV had been left on for a couple of days. There was no internet during the time when I was gone. NADA ZILCH and it still managed to update this app or change some kind of setting related to this program. That's the scary part. Without the wifi connection it still managed to do something on it's own without my consent. I live in an apartment building and now I'm wondering if the TV's communicate with each other or somehow manage to connect through unsecured wifi networks without my knowing. I've been noticing this as well on one of my computers as well. No internet while I'm gone but it will somehow say that there is a Windows Update even though it has no way of connecting to the internet while I'm gone. If anyone is wondering, I run my whole house off of my mobile Verizon hotspot and I take it with me when I leave.

 

[bkturf]

Just to get this out there. I have had a very large Samsung TV for a few years. I was so pissed at the constant Smart Hub notifications that popped up about once per hour and tried everything I could find to disable them and nothing worked. I finally connected a PC to the TV so I could view amazon, netflix, and hulu without having to deal with smart hub. When I purchased another large TV a year later, I did not even consider Samsung due to this issue, and got an LG. A few months ago, I reenabled smarthub on the Samsung TV and have noticed that there are no more smarthub notifications (I assume all the measures that I took to disable them in the past are still in place but now at least one of them actually works). Good work, Samsung, for finally allowing me to use the smart function on my TV without pissing me off once per hour. I would still never consider buying another Samsung since the smart interface is so crappy compared to an LG or Roku, so at least I learned that from the experience.