My smart TV got way faster when I blocked the ads—yes, really

I thought smart TVs would make my life easier. What I got instead was endless frustration. My four Roku TCL Smart TVs crawled through menus, took forever to load apps, and bombarded me with ads at every turn. I was thinking about replacing them when I tried something different: blocking ads through my router. This simple change made my TVs run faster than they had since the day I bought them.