What to Do If Netflix Won’t Connect to TV
This weekend one of my housemates asked me a weird question: Netflix, which used to work great on his TV, no longer loaded. Everything else on the TV worked fine, but Netflix just kept looping through the connection attempts, interspersed with endless “tvq-rnd-100” errors.
There are a few tricks you can use to troubleshoot situations like this, which will hopefully help you get back to passing the queue or planning your next bingewatch.
Avoid SEO Scam Sites That Don’t Give Good Advice
For starters, resist the urge to dump your error code into a search engine and click on the first result. Sounds like the first step you should take, but listen to me. There are too many websites that offer generic, often irrelevant advice that targets specific error codes. You will probably click on one of them, as I did, because you need answers and their SEO game is strong. And as you read their not-so-carefully compiled copy, you’ll start to feel like you’ve been fooled – or worse, you will try their advice and perhaps go too far in troubleshooting, creating more work for yourself to fix what you did.
You will be able to identify these sites by their common, inconvenient copy and unusual design. They will sound incredibly clichéd in their descriptions, use generic images to illustrate your problem, and offer the same standard advice you could probably come up with yourself: try logging out and back in, for example.
This does not mean that this is bad advice; it just might not be very specific to the error you’re seeing, and you’d better take your time digging a little deeper to see if there are any valid, proven steps others have taken to fix your problem.
Try basic troubleshooting
Before you even go to the Internet and jump the rabbit hole for tips, there are several methods you should try to see if you can get Netflix up and running on your own. First, confirm – as I did – that your TV’s connection is working fine. Can you download other apps? Stream from other services? If so, you probably have no problem connecting to Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
Start with a simple trick to restart whatever media streaming device you use to access Netflix. If that doesn’t work, try restarting your home network through your router (just in case). Then check for device and app updates. Is it possible to install something new that might solve this problem? Did an incomplete installation mess up your connection in some way?
You can try logging out of Netflix and logging back in, but I don’t think this usually fixes the connection error. Instead, go to the app’s settings and, if your media streaming device allows it, clear the app’s data and cache. This will, of course, log you out, so make sure you have your username and password in standby (especially if the Netflix account you are using does not belong to you, wink ).
Uninstall and restore the Netflix app, but not the media streaming device.
What ultimately helped me get Netflix to work on my housemate’s TV was to uninstall the Netflix app, wait a minute or so, and reinstall it. As soon as I logged in again, the streaming worked without a hitch. This is the classic “press reset” fix button and the method I’m looking at to move up my list of “common troubleshooting methods.” The only thing I doubt is that I hate entering login details – especially complex passwords – with the TV remote.
However, I would recommend that you do not reset your media streaming device or Smart TV to factory settings until you have exhausted all other options. This should be seen as a last resort and takes me back to my original point: generic troubleshooting sites that use SEO for advertising will always have a “factory reset” as one of the options on their list. And because they give you general advice, you might be tempted to take this step before you exhaust your other options. Do not. It’s tedious to re-configure your entire media streaming device, including re-downloading all apps, and it might not even fix the issue if the error is bizarre enough, or say specific to a recent app update.
Learn from others who have faced the same problem
Whatever you say about Reddit, Twitter or any other large community where people hang out and complain, help each other solve various technical problems. Online forums and social networking services are incredibly valuable for troubleshooting because chances are good that you will find someone (or many people) who have had the same problem as you.
You can learn a lot by reading other people’s experiences with your problem, including troubleshooting tips that worked or definitely didn’t work. I would not rule out the latter entirely; just lower their priority on your list. Likewise, don’t be discouraged if something that worked for one person doesn’t work for you. This is why it is called “troubleshooting”.
I can’t count how many times someone with a lot of experience working with a technical issue found a bizarre setting or unintended fix that would save the day. I trust the user community more than theofficial customer support channels of the service; Seek the advice of fellow fanatics as one of your early troubleshooting methods and it will come in handy.
You can also consult social media and web forums to find out if the error you are encountering is widespread or something that only affects you, which can help you decide if you even need to fix everything in the first place … If Netflix is throwing an error code for a large number of people or many owners of the same streaming media device as you, there is probably nothing you can do to fix it right now.
Troubleshooting problem
Whenever you run into a technical problem you can’t solve, you can start trying a bunch of random fixes to see what’s sticking to the wall – down to nuking your device and tweaking it from scratch. You might be tempted to throw your device away if it’s old enough and replace it with something newer.
Breathe instead. Take a moment. Please rate . Start moving from the easiest to the most difficult / annoying troubleshooting methods. And while you are doing this, investigate .
This is how I approach most technical problems, and it always amazes me how many people don’t know how to start troubleshooting. They just sigh, give up and wait for a fix to show up – as if their device knows something is wrong and has sent a silent message to the tech gods asking for help. Of course, in some cases it works, but in most cases it is up to you. Avoid bad answers, try the basics, then reach out to see what worked and what didn’t work for everyone else. You will most likely find a solution that eluded you at first.