The question’s in the title. I was eating lunch with my wife today. The Dot was playing some music. Suddenly, the TV turned itself on. The remote was in it’s holder and the on/off button was not in contact with anything. I shut it off, but later when I turned it back on, it was rebooting. Any ideas?
Any close neighbors?
I assume this is a “smart TV”? (Since you said it was rebooting).
It’s possible it wakes up periodically to check for system software updates, which it was doing when you powered it back down. It had to finish them when you turned it back on, hence the reboot.
Yep. Happened to me once. Scared the crap outta me.
As did mine. I believe once it came on after a power outage.
My Samsung smart TV does this about five minutes after being turned off about 10% of the time. I’ve given up trying to figure out why.
I don’t connect a TV itself to the internet. No reason to. Streaming I get through my cable box or a PC.
Were you jangling your keys?
It’s an apartment building, but the closest neighbor to us is the next floor down and directly under us.
Sounds like it’s a common enough occurrence, but I’d like to know why. Glitch? Looking online, it seems there are any number of causes. Hopefully it won’t come on at night and scare the crap out of us.
Modern “smart” TVs are essentially computers. When you “turn it off”, you’re doing a similar thing as when you put your computer to sleep. It’s not completely powered off (obviously, since it needs to respond to the next remote control input to turn it on). The most likely explanation for why it turned itself on, at a high level, is it’s simply a software bug of some sort. There’s unlikely to be any way to determine in any more detail exactly what happened.
Amusing story: when I was working for Roku, in the very early days we gave some early alpha units to some of our major investors for them to play around with. One of the investors was a tech big shot whose name you would almost certainly recognize. One night he left his TV powered on with the Roku software parked on its home screen. In the middle of the night he was suddenly awakened by a loud clamor and people shouting in his living room. He immediately called the police. He was not amused to discover the explanation, that a bug in the Roku software caused his unit to unexpectedly start playing a video.
This is funny timing, because my TV in the den keeps turning itself on. I blamed my daughter at first because she was in here watching it; now I keep walking into a scrolling Roku screen. I went and checked it when I saw this post, and indeed, it was back on.
But that’s how every TV I have ever used worked. All those big tube sets still turned on with a remote. How would being a smart TV be any different in that way?
Occasionally my AppleTV will turn itself back on after I shut it off, which then auto turns on the TV. I figured out it was the Spectrum app. If I then close the Spectrum app on the AppleTV, it’ll shut off like it should. It has done that on two separate TVs by different manufacturers, and two different AppleTV devices. So possibly an app on the Roku is doing the same thing.
It turned out Roku was insisting on an update. Once I did that, it stopped turning on. Freaking tech, I tell you.
The old TVs that I was familiar with when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s didn’t have a remote. There was a power switch on the TV that (AFAIK) completely killed the power to the TV, like turning off a light bulb.
Later TVs gained remote controls, but weren’t yet “smart”, in the sense that there was no CPU or anything remotely similar. I don’t know exactly how those worked, but I suspect there was a separately powered circuit for the IR reader, whose only purpose was to turn on the main power when it received the appropriate remote command. When “turned off”, almost all of the internal components apart from the IR receiver were not powered.
My point was that in modern “smart” TVs, there’s often little difference in the TV’s state when it is “off” vs. when it is “on”, other than that the display is disabled. Better designs will put the electronics into a low power state as well, but even then, it’s much easier for some design oversight to cause the TV to “turn on” unexpectedly, since from some points of view, internally it’s always “on”.