Telly has only delivered 35,000 of its free televisions with always-on ads
Telly appeared on the home theater scene in 2023 with an unusual proposition. Its business model involves offering customers free dual-screen TVs, with the lower screen showing continuous advertisements. At the time, the startup’s executives predicted that Telly would ship its first 500,000 screens that summer. However, Janko Roettgers of Low pass reported that Telly only had 35,000 household positions at the end of the third quarter of 2025. This figure appears to come from a quarterly investor update, but Telly did not provide Roettgers with any comment on the report.
Personally, I don’t think I’d want free TV that perpetually bombards me with ads, but it seems Telly was actually interested in his approach; the company reportedly had 250,000 pre-orders as of June 2023. However, it has encountered issues delivering these TVs to customers in one piece. The quarterly report reportedly indicated that 10 percent of Telly’s shipments via FedEx arrived broken. A thread on the company’s Reddit page from a year ago confirms this, chronicling delayed shipments and broken replacements. In short, things aren’t going so well for the company at the moment.
