A black screen is not one problem, it's four different ones wearing the same symptom. Live video arrives in short segments, about 6 seconds each, and gets decoded and rendered on top of the guide layer. That render can fail at the source (one bad channel), in the background (a refresh cycle), on the server (a whole group drops), or in the app itself after an update changes how it talks to the decoder. Restarting the app fixes exactly one of those four. The other three need a different move, which is why generic restart advice only works some of the time.

Check this before you change any setting, because it points you straight at the cause. Switch to two or three other channels in different groups and watch what happens. If only the original channel is black, the fault sits at that channel's source feed and is out of your hands until it resyncs on its own. If a whole group goes black together while unrelated groups keep playing, the shared upstream connection for that group has an issue on the server side, not your device. If every channel is black, the problem is broader: look at the app itself or your connection, not one stream, and move on to the switch-away-and-back test next.

1. 1One channel black, others fine: source-side fault on that feed
2. 2One group black, others fine: server-side fault on that group
3. 3Everything black: app, decoder, or connection issue

This is a specific pattern, not generic buffering: a short black flash, roughly half a second, on a fixed interval, regardless of which channel is playing. That points to a background playlist or EPG (electronic program guide, the on-screen channel and schedule listing) refresh cycle briefly taking over the render layer while it reloads. It's not a bandwidth issue and buffer settings won't touch it. Time two or three blips with a clock. If the gap is consistent no matter what you're watching, that's the refresh cycle, and there is nothing to fix.

Once you've scoped the problem to the app or connection rather than one channel or group, two settings do most of the real work. Set the player's buffer to none or minimal, since a large buffer just delays how long a black screen takes to clear once the underlying issue resolves, instead of preventing it. Switch your device's DNS resolver to a public one in your network settings, which shortcuts a common cause of slow or failed channel loads. Together these two changes clear up decode stalls and slow name resolution far more often than a blanket restart, and each one takes under a minute to test and reverse if it doesn't help.

Some black screens are oversold server capacity on the provider's side, and no Android TV setting reaches that, no matter how carefully you work through buffer, DNS, and cache. If you've confirmed the fault scopes to one whole channel group and switching away and back doesn't clear it, that's a server-side problem, not yours to fix from the device. This is exactly why a provider's uptime number matters instead of being a marketing line: at 99.99% uptime, that works out to about 53 minutes of downtime a year across the whole service, which is the honest ceiling on how often this should happen at all, not zero, and worth checking before you sign up anywhere.