Telly has only delivered 35,000 of its free ad-supported televisions.

5 hours ago7 min read

Telly’s grand entrance into the home theater market back in 2023 was a classic Silicon Valley moonshot: give away a sleek, dual-screen television for free, funded by a constant stream of ads on a lower display. The company’s executives were bullish, predicting a half-million units shipped by that summer.Fast forward to the end of Q3 2025, and the reality, as reported by Janko Roettgers of *Lowpass*, is a starkly different picture. According to an investor update, only about 35,000 of these sets have actually made it into living rooms.That’s a mere 7% of their initial, wildly optimistic target. The company itself offered no comment on the figures, which speaks volumes.Digging deeper, the problems appear systemic. While Telly reportedly amassed a quarter-million pre-orders initially, execution has been a nightmare.A shocking 10% of shipments via FedEx arrived broken, a statistic grimly corroborated by a trail of frustrated customer posts on the company’s own Reddit page from a year ago, detailing delayed deliveries and defective replacements. It’s a fascinating case study in how a disruptive business model can be undone by the brutal, old-school logistics of actually getting a physical product to a customer intact.The concept itself—trading your attention and data for hardware—isn’t new, but Telly’s aggressive, always-on ad approach was always a tough sell. Now, with shipment woes crippling its rollout and casting serious doubt on its scalability and unit economics, the future of this free TV experiment looks increasingly like a cautionary tale about the gap between tech vision and operational reality.

#Telly

#free TV

#advertising

#business model

#shipping issues

#featured