Why Your Vizio TV Might Be Stuck On A Black Screen (And A Few Fixes To Try)

One of the most surprising tech news stories of 2024 was that TV maker Vizio was being sold to Walmart, with the main reason being that Walmart brass felt it was a great way to expand the smart TV advertising wing of the company. For years, Vizio had a solid rep for making very nice-looking bang-for-your-back TVs that provided a better value than similarly priced TVs from tenured name brands, though it's had less of a claim to that corner of the market since TCL and Hisense became major players in the high-quality budget TV space. Time will tell if being owned by such a retail giant will allow Vizio to reclaim its more prominent spot in the flatscreen TV world.

Though Vizio TVs are generally well-regarded, they're still consumer electronics and can still be prone to various problems as a result. One potential such problem is that the TV will seemingly be on, with the power light visible, but there's no picture, just a black screen. Specific to Vizio TVs, this is likely a common concern because Vizio includes the ability to "mute" the display while using music streaming apps. If you don't know about the feature, it can be pretty easy to get yourself into a situation where it seems like the TV is broken because the audio is working fine while the screen is black. Let's look at how to "unmute" the display and what else to try if that doesn't fix the problem.

Vizio has several different troubleshooting steps for users to undertake when their TV is stuck on a black screen. Some of them are on the more obvious side, such as checking if your TV is powered off or in standby mode, or power cycling the TV by unplugging it and plugging it back in. Vizio smart TVs' ability to turn off the display while using music streaming apps is less obvious, especially if it happened because a kid or pet accidentally sat on the remote. So if you're still getting audio with a black screen, that might be the problem. To "unmute" the display, press and hold the mute button on your remote for five seconds, releasing it once the picture returns.

Another way to troubleshoot the problem is to press the Menu button on your Vizio remote. If the menu pops up, then there's nothing wrong with the display proper, but there may be something wrong with an external source device, the cable connecting the external source to the TV, or the physical port on that the cable is plugged into. In that case, you want to make sure that the cable connections are secure and that the external source device is powered on. Rotating HDMI ports to see if a specific port isn't working is also worth exploring. You should also check if you're current on firmware and software updates, but if the Vizio menu works, then the most likely culprit is the external device you're trying to use, its HDMI cable, or your TV's HDMI port.