Can You Connect A Smart TV To A Mobile Hotspot?

Can you connect a smart TV to a mobile hotspot? Smart TVs have become very popular all across the globe and are now available at various price points.

You can easily buy a smart TV for your house for a fraction of the price that they were available at before. Simply put, a smart device is regarded as one that is capable of connecting to the internet.

It may seem pretty simple but this opens up a lot of opportunities and possibilities for the end consumers, improving their consumption of content and making it easy for them to view whatever they want.

Today, a vast majority of the TVs sold in the market are smart. They contain Internet capabilities and you can also install different kinds of apps on them.

For instance, popular apps such as Netflix and Youtube are readily available and you can install them without a hitch on your TV and use them.

Many smart TV manufacturers usually take security seriously so they often take a variety of different measures to ensure that nobody can tamper with their TVs.

This way, you should know that installing additional apps on your TV, especially those that come from unlicensed sources, is not going to be easy.

If you want to make the best use of your smart TV, the first thing you need to do is to connect it to WiFi or through a LAN cable.

If you take a look at the series of ports available at the back of the TV, you will notice that there is an ethernet cable port as well. If you don’t have access to WiFi, you can always connect directly via a cable.

This also gives you improved speeds and a more reliable connection in the long run. Connecting to the WiFi through your TV is incredibly easy and doesn’t require much of an effort at all.

All you have to do is to go to the settings on your TV and then look for network settings. From there, just go to WiFi and you will see a list of all the available networks in your vicinity.

If you have a local home network that you want to connect to, you can do that as well. If not, there is always the mobile hotspot that you can use.

If your WiFi network is acting up or is quite patchy, which makes it difficult for you to view your content without constant interference and stops, you need to make the switch.

But how do you switch to a different network so easily? It’s simple: you use the mobile hotspot feature available on your smartphone.

Almost every smartphone nowadays comes with a feature to turn on hotspot, allowing you to share your mobile data with other devices that can connect. Here’s how to do it.

How To Connect Mobile Hotspot To Smart TV

If you have enough mobile data to watch high-quality movies on your TV, you can simply turn on mobile hotspot and then search for the appropriate network in your TV’s list of WiFi options.

Here’s the process of connecting your smart TV to a mobile hotspot:

  • Go to your connection or network settings and allow your smart TV to scan for WiFi networks that are available.
  • On your phone, enable mobile hotspot so that your smart TV can automatically detect and find it.
  • Once your mobile hotspot appears on the list of available networks, select it and enter your password.
  • Finally, you can now browse or stream your favorite content on the internet from your smart TV through your phone’s mobile hotspot!

It’s an incredibly simple way of connecting seamlessly to a reliable WiFI connection. As long as your mobile network is in range and there are no problems, your video will render smoothly and there will be no delays in buffering either.

However, you need to keep in mind that most smart TVs adjust the resolution and thus the bandwidth and the size of the file being used, depending upon your connection speeds.

For instance, if you are using Netflix or a limited connection with low speeds, the video quality will automatically take a dip. This way, your content will continue to run smoothly but video quality as a whole will be reduced sharply.

Netflix favors convenience over quality to allow a person to watch more and more content. The same goes for other apps in the market as well.

Prime Video does exactly the same and if you have the Auto setting selected on Youtube, it’s also going to scale down the resolution when there is a dip in the connection speeds.

But if you have 4G LTE running on your device, the TV will automatically scale up the content to 4k or 1080p, whichever is available, which means that you will be consuming a considerable amount of data.

When you consider the fact that most people have metered connections with limited space available in a month, you should know that a single movie will run you out directly.

That is why it is important for you to keep a check on your bandwidth consumption and your data usage. Thankfully, almost all modern smartphones come with sophisticated tracking tools and features, allowing you to keep a check on the maximum amount of data being used.

If you feel that too much data is being used, you can always turn off the 4G radio and switch to 3G. Even then, the scaling will be done automatically and throughout the course of one movie, you are easily going to run out of a considerable number of GBs.

Why Won’t My TV Connect to My Hotspot?

If your mobile hotspot is already working at maximum capacity, there’s a high chance your smart TV won’t connect to your mobile hotspot! This is because Mobile hotspots and WiFi routers have different capacities.

While there are some hotspots that can connect to as many as 10 devices at the same time, other hotspots can only connect to a total of 5 devices at once.

However, if your smart TV is the only device trying to connect to your mobile hotspot, there are a few things you can do to troubleshoot the connection issue:

  • Switch off both your smart TV and the phone that’s providing the mobile hotspot.
  • After one to two minutes, restart both your smart TV and phone and then try to connect the two devices again.
  • The process of switching off and on allows your mobile hotspot to reboot and refresh and you should now be able to connect your smart TV to your mobile hotspot without any issue!

What About Rebroadcasting?

A number of mobile phones now allow you to rebroadcast WiFI signals in order to cover a greater area. Simply put, this feature allows you to conveniently use your phone as a Wifi range extender.

If your TV is located in a dead zone or in an area of the house where the WiFi signal strength is relatively low, it’s obviously going to be difficult for you to stream content smoothly on your device.

In such situations, your only option will be to install a WiFi range extender or make use of the rebroadcast option.

This way, you can turn on the mobile hotspot while the WiFi is still on and your mobile will simply rebroadcast the Wifi signals over a greater area, allowing your TV to connect smoothly.

It’s one of the best options for people who live in a big house and don’t have adequate WiFi coverage in every room, which impairs their ability to consume content freely.

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About David

Hey there, I'm David. I recently joined the Spacehop team from Tech Devised, and love writing about all things TECH! When I'm not writing, you can find me enjoying the great outdoors with my golden retriever Lucy or enjoying a pint at my local Irish pub.

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