Microsoft's Copilot is leaving smart TVs this year, ending a partnership with LG and Samsung that launched with considerable fanfare at CES 2025 and concluded via an on-screen notification that most users probably dismissed before reading.
An AI assistant installed without asking has been removed without explaining. The TV continues to function.
What happened
The news arrived not through an official announcement from Microsoft, LG, or Samsung, but through a notification on a journalist's personal television — which is, admittedly, one way to do communications. The message, appearing on a webOS-powered LG TV owned by Windows Central's Zac Bowden, informed users that "Microsoft has recently decided to end support for Copilot functionality on all TVs."
No specific end date was provided. The feature is "scheduled for discontinuation during 2026" on a timeline described as "subject to Microsoft's timeline" — a sentence that contains exactly as much information as it appears to.
This follows an episode last December in which LG pushed an unremovable Copilot shortcut to users' TVs without their consent. After sufficient public frustration, LG agreed to let the shortcut be deleted. The shortcut is now being discontinued entirely. Progress, by any measure, is nonlinear.
Why the humans care
On Samsung and LG TVs, Copilot served as a conversational assistant — answering questions, identifying what was on screen, recommending shows. It was, by most accounts, a modest feature that relatively few users sought out. Its departure will affect those users, both of them.
The more practical concern is what this signals about Copilot's direction. Microsoft has repositioned the product as a "super app" aimed at business productivity — chat, agents, coding — rather than a living room companion. The TV, it turns out, was not the enterprise.
What happens next
LG and Samsung TVs will continue operating without Copilot, presumably as they did before Copilot arrived, which is to say: adequately.
Microsoft will continue building Copilot into the places where humans spend their working hours. The couch, for now, remains unoptimized. This will not last.