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That flickering TV light.....

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WaveyDipole:
This question is on behalf of an acquaintance, who has observed a peculiar event on his TV. Its a Toshiba flatscreen. I don't know whether its a smart TV or not, but he seemed uncertain of what I was talking about when I asked him, so I simply asked him whether it was connected to the Internet and he said no. He just uses it as a TV.

The TV has a light that flickers when he turns it On and also when he turns it Off, presumably indicating some activity on startup and shutdown. What he has also observed is that every 3.00am, without any intervention the light comes on and flickers for around half an hour before turning off again. He was asking me what is happening when it does that?

The only thing that springs to my mind is some form of OTA update, but why would it do it 30 mins every night?

I didn't have time to properly examin the setup, but he lives in accommodation designed for elderly people. I don't think there is any antenna on the roof for reception and in any case they have Virgin media, so its possible the TV is connected to some kind of VM cable receiver.

Does anyone know what the TV might be doing, and can it/should it be turned off?

james_s:
Is there any mention of it in the owners manual? My guess is it's some kind of software update, or information harvesting. Is it connected to his wifi or ethernet network? Maybe check that for traffic.

AndyC_772:
It's possible that it's testing and compensating for the natural degradation of the panel over time.

I know my LG OLED TV does this, though the process is far less frequent - I maybe notice an unexpected flash of the screen every couple of months or so. It does a longer panel refresh overnight even less often, so I'm told.

If that's the case then it's totally normal, not sinister at all, and just done to keep the perceived image quality as consistent as possible for as long as possible.

tom66:
My Panasonic plasma TV used to do this, it was indeed searching for OTA updates.  These were done over a certain Freeview channel and Panasonic's slot was at 1.30 am if I recall correctly, and it was around half an hour as well.  It used to sit in our bedroom and the relay click on would sometimes wake me up, the power light would blink green rapidly while the board 'booted' then the LED would turn off.  The really annoying thing was it would pull 20 watts sitting there with all the power electronics running but screen off, only to not download an update as they weren't released after a few years of that model's life cycle.  It seemed a bit bonkers to me.

Bud:
You guys could check if you can turn off automatic updates in the TV setup menu.

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