Philips PUS8500 and PUS9000: what they ship with and what comes off

Most of this site is about connecting a television over ADB, listing the packages and disabling the ones you do not want. Before you read on, you should know that you cannot do that on a Philips PUS, and that the PUS range is by far Philips' biggest seller.

The PUS sets are not Android. They run Titan OS, Philips' own system, and it is closed: no ADB, no pm disable, no package list to reach. If you bought a cheap Philips expecting to clean it up like an Android TV, you bought the wrong set.

The useful part comes next, because you can still cut down a fair amount of what the television does on its own. Just by a different route.

There are two systems inside the PUS range itself#

This is the bit almost nobody mentions. Checking Philips' own product data model by model, the PUS8100 declares OS: Google TV™ and 16 GB of memory, while the PUS7000, PUS7200, PUS8000, PUS8200, PUS8400, PUS8500, PUS8600 and PUS9000 all declare OS: TITAN OS and 8 GB. Philips' own brochure titles the PUS8100 "The Ambilight TV with Google".

So: two televisions from the same family, looking identical on the shelf, a hundred euros apart, running systems with nothing in common. One takes everything this site explains and the other takes none of it.

Which makes the first step, before buying and before reading further, check the exact number. Not "a 55-inch Philips" but 55PUS8500/12 or 55PUS8100/12. It is on the rear label and on the box, and the middle number is the one that decides.

What the PUS8500 and PUS9000 are#

Both are Philips' upper LED range with Titan OS, both come in six sizes from 43 to 85 inches, and both have three-sided Ambilight. The similarities end there.

The PUS8500 is a 60 Hz panel with the Pixel Precise Ultra HD engine, three HDMI ports with eARC on the first, 20 W of sound on every size, and HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG. No Dolby Vision.

The PUS9000 (the one Philips calls "The One") is 120 Hz native with the P5 engine, four HDMI ports with eARC on the second, VRR declared at 144 Hz, and Dolby Vision on top of the rest. Sound runs from 20 W on the 43-inch to 40 W on the 55 and 65, and 50 W on the 75 and 85.

And a trap inside the series itself: the native 144 Hz is only on the 65 and 75-inch sets. The 43, 50, 55 and 85 are 120 Hz. Buying the big 85 expecting the fastest panel in the range is money thrown away.

One note on honesty with the data sheets: on the 85PUS8500_12, Philips writes "LED Full HD" in the display field and 3840 x 2160p two lines below it. That is an error in their own database, not an 85-inch Full HD television, but it is why you read the whole sheet rather than one field.

And one figure that appears only on the regulated sheet and not in the brochure: networked standby draws 2.0 W on both series, while ordinary standby stays under 0.5 W on the PUS8500 and under 0.3 W on the PUS9000. In other words, keeping the television reachable on the network while it is off costs four times as much as having it properly off. It is not much money a year, but it describes rather well what the set is doing when you think it is doing nothing.

What you cannot do, however much you read#

Install apps that are not in the Titan OS store. There is no sideloading.

Disable system components. The list does not exist.

Replace the launcher. The Titan OS home screen is the only one there is.

And uninstalling preinstalled apps: the official manual documents no way of doing it. Its apps chapter explains how to browse and install them and says nothing about removing them. If your firmware offers a delete option, use it, but do not count on it, because Philips does not promise one.

What you can do: the privacy settings#

Nearly all of the result is here, and it is buried in a submenu.

The manual gives the exact path: Home → Settings → General settings → Privacy settings. There are three things inside.

The privacy preference centre, where you review and change the consents you accepted during the initial setup without reading them.

The advertising ID, the number your television introduces itself with to ad networks. You can view it and, by pressing OK, replace it with a new random one. Doing that periodically breaks the accumulated profile.

And limited ad tracking. Here it is worth quoting the manual, because it is clearer than any summary: with it enabled, "advertising may be less relevant for you. This will not affect the number of adverts shown." It removes the profile, not the adverts.

The free streaming channels are advertising#

Titan OS offers a source called Streaming with free channels that add themselves to the guide. The manual says it plainly: these are channels "supported by advertising", and installing them means accepting their own terms of use and privacy policy.

If you do not use them, do not install them. And if they are already there, note that the advertising settings above exist precisely because of them.

HbbTV: four switches almost nobody touches#

Ordinary broadcast channels watch too. Under Home → Settings → Channels → HbbTV settings there are four options worth two minutes.

HbbTV turns the whole service on or off. HbbTV tracking, in the manual's words, "will inform the HbbTV services not to track your browsing behaviour". HbbTV cookies controls third-party cookie storage. And there are two more buttons: reset the television's unique device identifier, which creates a new one, and clear the list of HbbTV apps you have approved.

That is tracking over the aerial and the cable, not over the internet, and it switches off without touching anything else.

The microphone is in the remote, not in the set#

These models have Amazon Alexa built in and work with Google Home, which tends to alarm people. The EU regulated sheet settles the point: in the sensor section it declares "voice recognition sensor available: no" and "room presence sensor available: no".

The microphone is in the remote and activates when you press. The television is not listening to the room by itself.

What TP Vision admits it collects#

Philips publishes, alongside each model, a pre-contractual notice under the EU Data Act. It is the frankest document in all the official material, and it says this: the televisions generate data in JSON, "approx. 1 TB per day, generated by ~11 million devices", at "~100k data records per device/day on average". It is kept for between one and nine months.

What it contains: on/off status, usage interactions such as volume changes and remote-control commands, connectivity status, picture and sound settings, diagnostics and firmware. And one sentence worth reading in full: content data, "e.g. watched media content", is not part of the accessible datasets.

The part that matters to you is the end of the notice: it recognises the right of access, of erasure and of portability, and gives an address, [email protected], and TP Vision's privacy policy as the route. On a system where you cannot switch anything off in software, that is the only lever that reaches what has already left your house.

Ambilight is safe, and eight years of updates#

Two closing points, both reassuring.

Ambilight lives in the firmware, below the system. Nothing on this page affects it.

And the EU regulated sheet for both series declares eight years of guaranteed availability of software and firmware updates from the end of placement on the market, seven years of spare parts and seven of product support. That is more than almost anyone offers. A closed system is not the same as an abandoned one.

If you have one#

What is missing to close this page is what only an owner can supply: whether your Titan OS lets you uninstall any app, which one, and whether an update has put your privacy settings back where they started. That is how you document, with data, a system almost nobody writes about.