09-01-2020 15:29
When trying to cast NowTV to a Chromecast plugged into a television, I am met with four coloured circles spinning in the centre of a black screen - I recognise this as the loading screen.
If left for a long period (five to ten minutes), it goes back to the Chromecast 'idle' screen, and the NowTV app then considers itself disconnected from the Chromecast device. This happens whether just clicking "cast" and waiting for the "NowTV Ready" screen, or when playing video on the phone and then trying to cast the video.
I have tried a significant number of fixes, and this has been going on for months. Below are details of the entire saga.
Firstly: I am aware that NowTV (contrary to industry standards) count a Chromecast as a device that is registered on the account against the six streaming devices allowed. There are currently three empty device slots available on my account, so this should not be an issue (the device limit is not the underlying issue that I am facing).
These issues first occurred last summer, and affect two Chromecasts.
Initially, I tried all the regular 'fixes' such as rebooting the Chromecast devices, etc. with no luck. I eventually got in touch with NowTV customer services, who sent links to articles and information.
More things I tried:
I also tried many of these in various combinations. For example, factory resetting the Chromecast and reinstalling the NowTV app before trying again. Then the same but with the addition of a router reboot, etc.
None of these combinations worked.
NowTV eventually claimed that, rather than the NowTV service being at fault, both Chromecasts must be faulty. For clarity, both Chromecasts work flawlessly for other services such as YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, iPlayer, All4, Spotify, ITV Player, etc.
Since then, the situation has developed:
My internet connection has been upgraded (from a respectable 36Mbps down to 70Mbps down and 8Mbps up to 15Mbps up). Though I never had any issues streaming services (non-NowTV) in 1080p / 4K with the old connection, this new speed can't hurt the situation!
The router/modem has been swapped out for a new, completely different, model.
After all the other troubleshooting, we even tried creating a new NowTV account, but with the same issues still.
Ultimately, after multiple software updates (to both the Chromecasts and the NowTV app), new accounts, new internet, device resets, etc. I decided to humour NowTV customer services, and elected to return the two Chromecasts as "faulty".
This (unsurprisingly) was a painful process, as, when the customer assistant asked why they were being returned, I had to tell them "because NowTV customer services told me they were faulty". When asked if I had any issues with other services I had to be honest and tell them "nope, they work flawlessly for everything else...", which perplexed the customer assistant as much as it did me. A lengthy discussion then ensued:
After all of that, the shop agreed to replace both Chromecasts with brand new (sealed box) units.
I just got them home. Plugged them in. Connected them to the new router, with the new internet service, using my new NowTV account, and a freshly signed in and installed iOS app.
Unfortunately, I hit the same problem: a black screen with spinning, coloured, circles (loading). After many minutes, the app "stops casting", and the Chromecast returns to its idle screen.
The new Chromecasts have been verified as working with other streaming services without issue.
At this stage, it seems obvious that NowTV is at fault, not the hardware.
Has anyone else has had any issues similar? Are there any reasonable steps I could take that I have not tried?
Lastly: NowTV, how do you propose we move forward with this issue? I've done everything you've asked and more.
08-06-2020 23:03 - edited 08-06-2020 23:08
Glad to hear you got this working. I'm not using Home Assistant although I
am running NodeRed which does query my Chromecast for status. I disabled
this however with no joy.
Some more reading suggests that I am not alone and is an ongoing issue with
built-in Chromecast devices in both Sony and Philips TVs. Hopefully NowTV
will resolve in the near future but for now I'm going to revert to a
standard Chromecast.
Thanks again.
09-06-2020 14:50
Still no joy here either. Just noticed that the Chromecast had been added as one of my devices in my Now TV account, but it still just sits on the loading page.
01-08-2020 19:35
Thanks, this solved it for me, too. Coming back to try and work this out again as I recently changed my router, I hit the same issue and again was able to get around it by putting the Chromecast on a guest network.
Putting it back on the main network and then removing it from Hassio, letting Hassio discover it again but then just leaving it unconfigured and adding it to the ignore list seems to have solved it.
So for others encountering this problem, if you aren't using Hassio, at a guess there is something else on your network that is accessing the Chromecast that the NowTV app doesn't like (but every other app has no issue with, which loops us back to the NowTV app being at fault and the company not being bothered to investigate / fix it).
27-08-2020 19:49
Continuing the WTF element of this, last night the old problem returned - went to cast something to the ChromeCast, spinning circles.
Doing some checking today, it seems that as my PC elsewhere in the house was on, it was Google Chrome running there that was the problem. Having just checked tonight with a few permutations, it seems to be something about this specific instance of Chrome - running it on another PC hasn't caused the problem; closing all the tabs and turning off all the extensions on the source of the conflict hasn't stopped the problem.
I'll investigate further if I can on the weekend. However, short term solutions are either:
- turn off the PC (sleep mode, hibernate or actually powered off all seem to work); or
- close Chrome AND kill the Google crash handler from task manager (I found two of these running and even with the browser closed the conflict continued until I killed those processes, then all was fine).
It must be something that on some level is accessing the ChromeCast. I just can't see what's doing that at present.
12-09-2020 20:47
Just wanted to say Thank You for the suggestion to check PCs that are running and using Chrome. This has fixed the problem for me and ended 3 days of trawling through forums and factory resetting all devices multiple times!
12-09-2020 20:52
Another thank you here. It would have taken me forever to figure this out. I have two chromecasts both were failing this way. they were both working only 4 days ago.
Blocked one of the chromecast's IPs in the firewall on my PC and that one started working. Blocked other IP and that one started working too.
15-09-2020 23:20
Solved: We've just started getting the spinning/loading issue when casting NOW TV from (any) iPhone to our Chromecast/TV. Following the idea in this thread that another device is hitting the Chromecast and blocking NOW TV, I went round eliminating each device in the house.
29-08-2020 19:29
Can't believe it, but this helped fix me too. I turned off the Chromecast Integration on HASSIO and started to work. Unbelievable. Thanks!!
09-09-2020 12:48
I registered on the forums just to say thank you! This resolved my issue, now just need to work out why HomeAssistant breaks NOW TV then I can re-enable it as it's useful to have!
19-09-2020 17:09
None of the suggestions here helped my issue (same symptoms), but they did prompt me to check obvious settings on my router. For me the solution was to enable IPTV on my router. Finally working, cross fingers this is the long term fix 🤞🤞🤞