A television was once a predictable machine: radio signal go in, picture and sound come out.
As with everything else whose character and shape has become "black rectangle", our TVs have now got "apps" and "smart" nonsense all up in them. ...I'll skip over the part where I painstakingly go in and turn off every bit of gross nonsense that's turned on by default, from nauseating motion-smoothing to blocking the spying features at the router level.
We found ourselves in a situation which is apparently just par for the course these days: our LG TV (mockingly using the name "webOS" even though it affords me none of the freedom of the beloved classic Palm devices) would attempt to download an update for a streaming service or other function, but the update would never actually install, just sit there at 100% not doing whatever it actually needed to do in order to run the new bits.
There are dozens of sites (mostly AI slop rewrites) describing a handful of quick fixes for this alarmingly common problem. Restart, really-restart, clear-the-cache, change-the-region, etc etc. We shot through every option, including the last-resort factory reset, and still no luck. I grabbed the latest firmware and upgraded to it via USB flash drive (why on earth can't the TV use this mechanism for other packages?!) and still the app store would get stuck at 100%, and nothing would finish installing.
The TV in this state wouldn't even accept a cast, so I dug up a spare chromecast device we'd picked up cheap. ...It wanted to install a bunch of nonsense and be its own whole nightmare of apps and spying, rather than just let us cast things from our phones. So I threw that shit back in a drawer and found our old chromecast, which dutifully just worked. These new TVs have precious few HDMI slots, and I was sad to give one up, but our TV did everything it needed to again, so life went on.
Then, a mind-boggling fix presented itself. I was double-checking that our laptop could connect to a live stream and put it on the TV, figuring I'd have to use Chromium instead of my preferred Firefox, but to my pleasant surprise, there are plenty of Firefox plugins which allow casting now. I looked into "streaming LAN cast" which relies on a python casting tool under the hood. Setting that up allowed me to select not only our trusty old chromecast target, but the TV itself, which no other casting-compatible app had shown us since all this trouble started. Just for fun, I tried it out, and our TV's cast function popped right up. Some cursory tests later, everything was working well. Our TV's built-in casting had been resurrected by this niche bit of open-source software. Somehow.
...My next move didn't make any sense at all, but I had nothing to lose, so I tried going in to the LG app store and installing some of those things which hadn't been working. ...And that worked, too.
So, for anyone searching through all those awful lists of steps to fix a stuck LG TV, give "streaming LAN cast" a shot. If you don't have a good way to try that, have a friend bring over a laptop. Or, just aggressively try every casting-compatible thing you can, to see if any of them let you connect to the TV. You may be able to wake it from its stubborn slumber and shake loose whatever mysterious nonsense was in the way.
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