Amazon Prime Video issues on Vizio TVs

Factual Questions
1

So I spent hours today trying to resolve and issue that seems to be getting worse.

I’m convinced that the Amazon App for Vizio is the fault here. I’ll do a little more testing while waiting on the Amazon Tech email. We have a Wii that runs Amazon, I’ll see how the playback on that is. So anyone else have problems?

*My testing and attempts to resolve problems are in a spoiler as it is long and wordy. *

[spoiler]I have a pair of Vizio smart TVs. Netflix & Youtube work great on both but Amazon is not great on the family room set and terrible on my bedroom set. A few months back I moved the access point closer to where my TV is as I was lucky to get 12mb WiFi as tested on my phone. After the move I got 25-35mb. This helped some issues but Amazon was still crappy. Bonus was my phone works well in my room not so well worth the effort.

I finally decided to run a hard cat-5 line to my bedroom from a switch. I hooked it up hoping it would fix things. Not so much.

So here is the Vizio issue, the speed test feature under networking turns out to be terrible. On Wifi it would read on a test 8mb and then 24mb, etc. even though I would get 32mb on the phone. With the wire, I was seeing 29-31mb and then drops down to 9mb.

OK, bring laptop in and test the speed on the cable. 81mb, way more than enough to run Amazon which should run with a 5mb connection.

Did some more google searches and of course full power downs and power ups. No help. Called Vizio, great helpline, got an American help desk rep fast after a fairly simple voice tree. He pushed a firmware update and this still did not help sadly. Though I did get 3 new apps at least.

Tried de-registering the device and re-registering the device with Amazon. Not any better.

Had Amazon help call me. Nice and quick, bit of an accent issue but not too bad. She had to elevate the call to techs who will send me an Email.

Tried Amazon on Samsung & Apple phone and it worked fairly well but I’m sure the bandwidth requirement is even lower. [/spoiler]

2

The Wii test worked well. Had fast playback and good resolution almost immediately.

3

This sort of problem is why I now avoid Smart TVs or DVD players with smart features. They tend to have lousy software and eventually they stop getting updates.

Much better success with Roku/FireTV/AppleTV devices, even the cheapest ‘stick’ versions.

4

I’ve got a Vizio TV and Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and Plex all work fine. The speed test on the TV shows wildly inconsistent results and wouldn’t count on it for anything.

5

[Moderating]
Since this is about the devices rather than the content, I’ll move it over to GQ from CS.

6

Can I ask what model Vizio you have. Every test I did points to a problem with the Amazon app on the Vizio TVs. It appears to be fine on the Wii, Samsung Galaxy & iPhone.

7

I’ve got a D55u-D1. I just checked my speed on the TV and it’s showing about 15 mbps, but it sometimes shows as low as 800 kbps and I can still watch Netflix @ 4k.

My tablet held next to the TV gets 45mbps.

8

Neither of my Vizios are 4K, I wonder if you have a different Amazon app as you have a more advanced TV. The TV I’ve been trouble shooting is only a D39h-D0. The other is 2 years older. It appears the Apps work a bit different on your TV.

Thanks for the data point.

9

Seconded. After many bad experiences with both TVs and DVD players, including firmware updates that ruined the few services that were satisfactory to start with, I’ve stuck firmly with external players (including Roku, which generally performs excellently regardless of what they’re connected to and whether they are hardwired or wireless). I’m going to encourage you to think of this option and maybe save yourself some time and grief trying to troubleshoot the TV.