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.
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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.
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