DirecTV will soon bring AI ads to your screensaver

DirecTV wants to use AI to put you, your family, and your pets inside a custom TV screensaver. If that’s not uncanny enough, you’ll find items you can shop for within that AI environment, whether it’s a piece of clothing similar to the one your AI likeness is wearing or a piece of furniture that pops up alongside it.

The satellite TV giant is partnering with the AI company Glance to roll out this experience to DirecTV Gemini devices starting next year. “We are making television a lean-in experience versus lean back,” Rajat Wanchoo, the group vice president of commercial partnerships at Glance, tells The Verge. “We want to give users a chance to use the advancements that have happened in generative AI to create a ChatGPT moment for themselves, but on TV.”

Glance is owned by InMobi, the same company that injected ecommerce bloatware into Motorola’s budget phones. It also powers the new Samsung Galaxy feature that puts shoppable, AI-generated images of yourself in different outfits on your phone’s lockscreen.

DirecTV devices currently show Google wallpapers when left idle. But soon, if you leave your TV inactive for 10 minutes, Glance’s AI experience will take its place. It will show a carousel of images that you can insert yourself into by scanning the QR code onscreen. It will prompt you to download the Glance mobile app to upload an image of yourself or someone else. You can also use the “craft my moment” feature to put yourself into a 30-second AI-generated video.

You can further customize the image or video by talking into your remote, such as asking it to change the color or style of clothing it puts you in. Wanchoo tells The Verge that Glance doesn’t create screensavers surrounding a specific product, but instead performs a reverse image search looking for items that are similar to the ones generated by AI. “No brand is pushing a product to you,” Wanchoo says, adding that Glance has 1 trillion SKUs it can match AI-generated images with. If you decide to purchase a product, you’d have to complete the transaction on your phone.

The feature is yet another way advertisers are trying to get creative with AI to make people buy products. Amazon has already rolled out tools that will fill its site with AI ads, and TikTok is allowing brands to create ads with AI influencers, like this one we saw from Vodafone. 

Glance has plans to cram AI ads into even more areas of your TV, too. “This, we can integrate across different places within the television,” Glance COO Mansi Jain says. “We are starting with the screensaver, but tomorrow … we can integrate it in the launcher of the TV.”