Smart TV Issue Question?

[MoodDisorder]

I work as tech support for an internet service provider and I received a call about their smart tv not opening up applications on their tv physically. My co-worker gets the same call and he has them plug in an ethernet cable and reboot the ONT to get the application to physically open on the tv. He said, "Certain applications won't open or try to open when there isn't a good connection." I am unable to find anything about this anywhere, so I am here to ask if anybody knows of such thing to exist and would be able to further explain why or how this would happen?

 

 

 

Side note, what even is a good title for this??????

[kirashi]

1 hour ago, MoodDisorder said:

I am unable to find anything about this anywhere, so I am here to ask if anybody knows of such thing to exist and would be able to further explain why or how this would happen?

Many Smart TV manufacturer's cheap out on the WiFi chipset or antenna, or even the wired ethernet chipset. I recommend hooking a computer up to your TV to make it actually smart, but if a consumer must have a Smart TV, avoid buying any brands on the following list.

https://www.consumerreports.org/tvs/tv-brands-arent-always-what-they-seem-a1006320983/

[MoodDisorder]

10 hours ago, kirashi said:

Many Smart TV manufacturer's cheap out on the WiFi chipset or antenna, or even the wired ethernet chipset. I recommend hooking a computer up to your TV to make it actually smart, but if a consumer must have a Smart TV, avoid buying any brands on the following list.

https://www.consumerreports.org/tvs/tv-brands-arent-always-what-they-seem-a1006320983/

How does cheaping out on internet components prevent an application from physically opening? Wouldn't that all be handled by the CPU and then the application would just take forever to load rather than just not open? The way I see it is, it's a short cut on your desktop that does nothing until you have an ethernet cable plugged in due to poor wifi connection and then suddenly starts to work properly.

[kirashi]

11 hours ago, MoodDisorder said:

How does cheaping out on internet components prevent an application from physically opening? Wouldn't that all be handled by the CPU and then the application would just take forever to load rather than just not open? The way I see it is, it's a short cut on your desktop that does nothing until you have an ethernet cable plugged in due to poor wifi connection and then suddenly starts to work properly.

Some apps perform connectivity checks prior to opening, or during opening. If connectivity is poor (or something else is aloof), the app may "crash" the user back to the Smart TV's interface, error on opening, or something else unexpected.

 

You're sorta right about streaming apps on Smart TVs or Cable Provider set top boxes being shortcuts though - last I checked, "apps" like YouTube and Netflix are merely shells that load their code in semi-real time / on-the-fly with each launch. This allows the developers to skip pushing new versions of their apps to the device everytime they want to make a minor change to the user interface or perform A/B testing.

 

Anywho, what you describe from your customers is unfortunate for them, but hopefully out of scope for your tech support department, as it'd be completely unreasonable for an ISP to support devices they didn't provide to the consumer.