Often, when I’m walking past the quaint remains of an early-20th-century painted advertisement preserved on the walls of an old brick building, I wonder whether the people who lived when those advertisements were viewed with the same degree of appreciation as we do today.
Is our tolerance of advertising just that much higher today? And is it high enough for you to take advantage of an offer by Telly, a firm that will send you a 55-inch 4K HDR TV, free of charge, as long as you subject yourself to non-stop advertising every time it’s on?
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Telly launched back in 2023 with grand plans to get 500,000 to accept their TV offer. They’ve signed up 35,000 since then, which is far short of their goal but nothing to sneeze at. The figure was first reported by Lowpass. While Telly itself hasn’t publicly released the delivery figures, Lowpass wrote that the 35,000 number came from a Q3 2025 update sent by Telly to investors in November 2025, which the author was able to review.
Below the main TV screen is a smaller, second screen that constantly shows ads. That’s how Telly makes its money. You can’t turn it off. I suppose you could paper over it with that leftover wrapping paper from Christmas, though, I guess.
Back when neon lighting was new and novel, plenty of people hated its intrusion into the Las Vegas Strip and New York City’s Times Square. They were ugly, people said. An eyesore. Then again, Parisians said the same thing about the Eiffel Tower when it was new, and like neon lighting it, too, eventually was seen in a new light.
Charming, even retro, given enough time, just like those advertisements for shoe polish and automobile tires painted on the sides of brick buildings. Even the advertisements of broadcast television have begun to look, in their own way, quaint to us.
But how much is too much? Always-there TV ads are wild to me. But am I just acting out my part as a person on the contemporary stage of Telly’s TV experiment, complaining of a facet of life that seems extreme now but will one day be pedestrian and commonplace, even quaint?
Lord, I hope not.
Updated January 31, 2026: We’ve added further details on the sourcing of Telly’s alleged delivery figures.
