Unravelling ACR on Samsung TVs

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Your Samsung TV Sees: Inside the S90D’s Always-On Content Recognition #

Every frame on the screen, from Netflix, your console, broadcast TV, to even a screen-mirrored phone, is fingerprinted and sent to Samsung roughly once a minute, on a schedule Samsung can change remotely. Here’s the evidence, pulled straight from the firmware of a 2024/2025 Samsung S90D.

TL;DR #

The S90D runs Automatic Content Recognition (ACR): it samples the picture ~2× per second and uploads perceptual fingerprints to Samsung’s cloud about every 60 seconds.
Capture happens at the display compositor inside TrustZone, before HDCP, so it is source-agnostic and captures DRM-protected streaming (Netflix included) in the clear.
Confirmed in-scope sources: Samsung TV+, third-party streaming apps, HDMI inputs, antenna/broadcast (tuner); screen mirroring has its own recognition path too. The one exemption: no fingerprinting at power-on. The upload engine is on-boot="false" and wakes when a source becomes active.
Fingerprints upload to acr-us-prd.samsungcloud.tv, an address the TV is handed at runtime by the control plane osb-v2.samsungqbe.com/service/acr/v2, so Samsung controls where the data goes, not just what’s collected.
The query interval is server-controlled. The binary literally logs Query Int from server(60 is set). Samsung can dial the cadence up or down without a firmware update.
Fingerprints are uploaded whether or not the server recognizes the content. Samsung receives the data either way.
The same process holds your Samsung Account identity, ad PSID, and ad targeting group, so viewing data can be joined to who you are.

ACR ain’t anything new #

ACR turns your TV into a measurement device. It periodically samples what’s on screen, reduces each frame to a compact fingerprint, and sends those fingerprints to a cloud service that matches them against a reference database to identify the show, channel, or ad. The result feeds viewing analytics and ad targeting.

Samsung on Sagar's Blog

Unravelling ACR on Samsung TVs

What Your Samsung TV Sees: Inside the S90D’s Always-On Content Recognition #

TL;DR #

ACR ain’t anything new #