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A Quick Fix for Apple TV’s Netflix Woes

Yesterday, my wife complained that she couldn’t watch Netflix via the Apple TV. “It’s probably down for a bit, just watch HBO GO until it comes back up,” I said. Sometimes various Apple TV services flake out and you have to wait for them to work again.

However, it still wasn’t working this morning, so I decided to investigate. Netflix seemed to start up fine on Apple’s puckish box, but when I tried to play the video, I received this error message: “There’s a problem communicating with Netflix. Try again later.” I decided it couldn’t have been an overnight Netflix outage, because that would have been front-page news.

It turns out that the solution is simple. Navigate to Settings > General, then choose Restart. When the Apple TV is functional again, Netflix will be as well. Another option is to yank out the power cord and plug it back in, but that requires getting off the couch, which is almost un-American.

The moral of the story is: When in doubt, reboot!

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