I used Claude to make my smart TV less annoying—here's what it could actually fix

Published Nov 8, 2026, 7:00 AM EST Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. I've had my LG TV for several years. It's still going strong, but there are a lot of things that it does that are really annoying. I decided to see if Claude could help me fix some of the biggest annoyances. Rooting my TV gave me SSH access Claude could then examine the TV software and build its own A recent video by Gamers Nexus provided shocking allegations about how much data an LG TV sends back to LG. Features such as Automatic Content Recognition can tell LG what you're watching just by examining the video and audio, even if it's content that you're watching on a DVD or Blu-ray. I decided to root my TV to install a privacy app that can help to stop some of these invasions of privacy. One benefit of rooting my TV was that I was able to enable SSH access. This meant that I could set Claude up so that it could talk to my TV over my local network with root access. Claude was then able to examine settings, software, and more, and could also make changes or write software of its own to run on the TV, allowing me to fix some of my biggest gripes. My TV was painfully slow to start Quick Start+ alone wasn't an ideal solution One of the things that annoys me most about my TV is that it's really slow to start up. After I turn the TV on, it can be 10 or 15 seconds before I can actually start watching anything. The Quick Start+ feature can reduce this significantly, but using this feature draws more power as the TV stays in a much lighter sleep state than typical standby. I didn't want my TV to be drawing more power day and night when we weren't using it, so I asked Claude if it was possible to have the TV power on temporarily at 5 PM, enable the Quick Start+ feature, and then turn off again. That way, when I came to turn on the TV in the evening, it would start up in just a couple of seconds. Quick Start+ would be disabled again towards the end of the evening so that the TV wasn't pulling more power than necessary overnight. Claude was able to set the whole thing up, and now my TV starts up like lightning in the evenings. The volume jumped every time I switched apps Some streaming apps are way louder than others Another thing that really annoys me isn't really the TV's fault at all. Different streaming apps seem to serve their audio at different volumes. If I'm watching Disney+, say, and then switch to Netflix, the audio is way louder even though the volume setting on the TV hasn't changed. With Claude's help, I was able to set up a script that stores the most recent volume value in each specific app. When you switch to a different app, the volume automatically switches to the last saved volume for that app. For example, the TV might be on volume 12 in Netflix, and when I switch to Disney+, it will automatically switch to volume 16, with the result being that both apps are roughly as loud as each other. The script works incredibly well. The first time I opened each new app, I had to set the volume level I wanted, but now it all happens automatically. When I switch from app to app, I no longer have to adjust the volume or cover my ears. I replaced LG's screensaver with beautiful works of art Another thing that annoyed me about my TV was the screensaver. Initially, it used to show ads when the screensaver came on, but even with that setting disabled, the stock screensaver is still incredibly dull. Claude built a dedicated app that runs on the TV and replaces the stock screensaver. After the TV has been idle for ten minutes, it displays a rotating selection of famous artworks, with a label giving the name and artist for each work. The screensaver is now beautiful and educational instead of showing some incredibly lame fireworks effects. It's a far better use of by far the biggest screen in my home. Using it to show a pretty awful animation as a screensaver was a real waste. Now that large screen is displaying works of art that are far nicer to look at than random explosions of colored dots. Claude couldn't fix everything Claude was able to fix a lot of the things that annoy me about my TV, but it couldn't fix them all. However, it's impressive what is possible with a rooted TV, a powerful AI assistant, and a little imagination. Thanks to LG's apparent disrespect for my privacy, my TV is now far better than it's ever been and is hopefully calling home far less.