Weird, annoying issue with an LG smart TV

[Gurke and Hare]

In some of the media apps on my TV - specifically iPlayer, Now TV and UKTV Play the apps load fine, and they load all the menu content but when I try to actually watch something I just get the revolving circle until it finally gives up.

The All4 app won't load at all.

The Youtube app works fine, and I can play videos on it. I can also stream video files from my network drive on the TV, so the TV's network connection seems to be fine.

I can also use the services that don't work on the TV on my phone and on my laptop so it doesn't seem to be anything inherent to them. It's really annoying, anyone got any ideas?

[Dex Sawash]

The onboard stuff always gets fucky eventually, there's a streaming stick in most smart tvs future

[jonbob]

I've found when mine started doing this it needed an old fashioned power off at the wall count to 10 and switch it on reset

[gmoney]

I find TV reviews never mention what the interface is like. We have an LG and the menus are slow as fuck. Infuriating.

[jonbob]

If I'd know the bloody thing would show me  ads for Apple TV as a pop up txt window overlay I'd never have bought it

[Gurke and Hare]

If I'd know the bloody thing would show me  ads for Apple TV as a pop up txt window overlay I'd never have bought it

Yeah, mine's started doing that now. Although apparently Samsung ones now have advertising on the menu screens, which has guaranteed I'll never buy one.

The original problem I was having here just fixed itself after a couple of days.

[touchingcloth]

The onboard stuff always gets fucky eventually, there's a streaming stick in most smart tvs future

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I also have an LG smart telly. It's the better part of a decade old and has become painfully slow. It takes about five seconds to input each letter when searching on the streaming apps - of which there are but a scant few. I'd have thought All 4 and Disney+ would be available on everything, but nope. I even made the mistake of signing up for an LG account to see if that would unlock more options, but it was just wall to wall apps that I'd never heard of and probably don't even work in this country.

#firstworld problems

[greencalx]

Possibly of limited interest, but I've been fairly happy with my Panasonic and I have a fairly low tolerance threshold when it comes to crap tech. The main annoyance is that the apps are non-functional until a certain point in the boot-up, the TV is coy about when this is, and the effect is that the app gives an error that can only be resolved by turning the TV off to restart the boot sequence. I don't mind there being a bit of a delay from start-up to full functionality, but it would be much better if it just put up some sort of "Please wait..." notice until it was fully ready to go after launching an app, rather then you having to power cycle and count to 100. In the first-world problems space, though, and if you remember to leave it for 30 seconds before doing anything fancy, it's all good.

I anticipate that it will be the software that goes long before the hardware, which is kind of annoying. I feel like there should be some sort of commitment to support products for the useable lifetime of the hardware.

[Martin Van Buren Stan]

I also have an LG smart telly. It's the better part of a decade old and has become painfully slow. It takes about five seconds to input each letter when searching on the streaming apps - of which there are but a scant few. I'd have thought All 4 and Disney+ would be available on everything, but nope. I even made the mistake of signing up for an LG account to see if that would unlock more options, but it was just wall to wall apps that I'd never heard of and probably don't even work in this country.

#firstworld problems

Just use a firestick or Chromecast?

[Dex Sawash]

Possibly of limited interest, but I've been fairly happy with my Panasonic and I have a fairly low tolerance threshold when it comes to crap tech. The main annoyance is that the apps are non-functional until a certain point in the boot-up, the TV is coy about when this is, and the effect is that the app gives an error that can only be resolved by turning the TV off to restart the boot sequence. I don't mind there being a bit of a delay from start-up to full functionality, but it would be much better if it just put up some sort of "Please wait..." notice until it was fully ready to go after launching an app, rather then you having to power cycle and count to 100. In the first-world problems space, though, and if you remember to leave it for 30 seconds before doing anything fancy, it's all good.

I anticipate that it will be the software that goes long before the hardware, which is kind of annoying. I feel like there should be some sort of commitment to support products for the useable lifetime of the hardware.

One of my TVs has a deep sleep power saving option that does this but you can toggle it off if you use it often/want to waste power keeping OS more awake.

[greencalx]

For some reason, when it comes to the telly, off means off. Doesn't apply to most of the rest of the equipment, though. Not sure why - probably a hangover from the 80s.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Most of these apps are containerised single page Web apps, eventually as pages get more fancy some tv's can struggle, especially if the apps make use of lots of javascript libraries (it doesn't help lots of things have dependencies for trivial operations that should be in a standard library) in a job where we made apps for smart tv's people were resorting to compressing jpg's harder to free up ram. I think they use NextJS noe so most of the operations have been rendered by a computer in the cloud instead of in the tv.