I have a Sony Bravia KD-43X8309C, which has Android TV as standard, bought in 2016/17. A few weeks ago, it got stuck on the “Checking for updates” screen and none of its “smart” features worked; however, it could still be used as a monitor over HDMI.

I tried to fix this by soft rebooting the TV, per Sony’s support instructions. That didn’t work. I escalated to hard rebooting the TV, again following Sony’s instructions. One of these actions — I don’t remember which — made matters worse. Instead of the TV starting, it gets about 2 seconds into the Android TV animation and then suddenly reboots itself. It now does this continuously.

I have read this is a known problem (perhaps the TV lost power during a firmware update, or something) and is referred to on Sony’s support pages and in their user forums. The advice was to try the above :(

As a last resort, I tried downloading the latest firmware to USB and booting from that. Again, same problem: the USB lights up, so it’s being powered at least, but no more than two seconds into the boot screen and it dies all over again.

Any advice would be appreciated. It’s not an old TV and it seems like a software failure to me. If a factory reset didn’t do the trick, is there anything left I can try?