A hotel television that streams the local Netflix catalogue without a hitch can suddenly go blank the moment you try to load BBC iPlayer. I've stared at that exact blank screen in more hotel rooms than I can count, remote in hand, waiting for an answer the TV was never going to give me on its own. The short version involves Smart DNS, a Surfshark setting buried a few menus deep, and a manual entry process on a Samsung or LG TV that nobody explains properly until you're annoyed enough to search for it at midnight.
Smart TVs are a different animal from your phone or laptop. Samsung and LG don't run Android — they use their own closed systems, webOS on LG and Tizen on Samsung, and neither one lets you install a full VPN app the way a phone does. That's the actual reason the blank screen happens: the TV genuinely cannot run the kind of software that would fix it, no matter how good your home Wi-Fi is.
What Smart DNS Actually Fixes on a Hotel TV
Surfshark's answer to that particular wall is Smart DNS — a setting that skips encrypting your whole connection and just tells the streaming platform where to think you are. Picture the difference between loading your whole car onto a ferry (a full VPN, thorough but slow) and simply showing a passport at a checkpoint (Smart DNS, quick and built for one job). A Samsung or LG TV doesn't have the processing muscle for the ferry option, which is exactly why Smart DNS exists as its own separate feature rather than a smaller version of the app.
I first mapped out this whole process at HUBBA-TO coworking in Bangkok, scribbling the two DNS numbers Surfshark handed me onto a sticky note between calls, because I already knew I'd be fumbling with a hotel remote later that night. That caution wasn't paranoia. Long before I'd worked out Smart DNS, I'd downloaded one of those free VPN apps from the App Store that promised unlimited access and then quietly capped out around 500 MB, killing an iPlayer episode mid-scene with zero warning. It was a strangely hard limit for something marketed as unlimited, and it's the reason I stopped trusting free VPN apps for anything beyond checking email on the move.
The Rest of the Travel-Tech Toolkit
Before any button-pressing, it helps to know what Smart DNS is and isn't, because there's a pile of adjacent travel tech solving different problems entirely. The reason any of this is necessary at all comes down to geo-blocking — streaming platforms checking your rough location and showing you a different catalogue, or none at all, depending on where that check lands. Smart DNS isn't the same fix as a dedicated IP, which solves a separate headache: the endless captchas that show up when too many people are funneled through one shared VPN server. It also skips server-switching entirely, since there's no country list to pick from here, just the two DNS addresses Surfshark hands you.
Travelling with a partner and a pile of devices raises a different question, and Smart DNS on a TV won't eat into your device-limit the way installing a whole extra VPN app might. Some people solve the hotel-TV problem a different way entirely, using a travel router configured once and shared across every device that connects to it — tidier, if you don't mind carrying one more box in your luggage. There's also a related but separate trick if you want to change Disney Plus region to watch UK content from anywhere — that one relies on region-spoofing rather than DNS, and it usually lives as its own setting inside a full VPN app.
Smart DNS also sidesteps the proxy-detection screens that pop up when a service catches a VPN's IP address, since no VPN IP address is involved at all. There's less speed overhead than routing everything through an encrypted tunnel, too, which matters on hotel Wi-Fi already stretched thin across a whole floor of guests. And because it's a DNS setting rather than an app, it avoids the platform-compatibility mess of trying to force real VPN software onto a TV operating system that was never built to run one. Smart DNS adds no public-wifi-encryption the way a full VPN connection does, so I wouldn't lean on it for anything beyond streaming on a network I don't fully trust. It's also a completely different mechanism from the dns-level-filtering some VPN providers use to block ads and trackers — that's a separate toggle, not something Smart DNS handles on its own.
Setting the DNS Manually on a Samsung (Tizen) TV
Samsung keeps this setting further from the surface than you'd like. Head into Settings, then General, then Network, and look for IP Settings followed by DNS Setting. Switch it from Get Automatically to Enter Manually, and two blank fields appear, waiting for the addresses listed in your Surfshark dashboard. Type carefully — the on-screen keyboard is slow, the remote's directional pad is slower, and one wrong digit sends you straight back to a Connection Failed message that never tells you which character was off.
Setting the DNS Manually on an LG (webOS) TV
LG buries the same option somewhere slightly different. Go to All Settings, then Network, then Wi-Fi Connection, and click Advanced Wi-Fi Settings, which sits at the very bottom of the menu as if LG would rather you didn't find it. Select Edit, uncheck Set Automatically, and enter the same two DNS addresses in the fields that appear. Once both numbers are in, restart the TV properly — not a quick off-and-on with the remote, but a full unplug, a ten-second wait, and a fresh boot, so it drops whatever local identity it was holding onto.
Why the Setup Sometimes Fails Anyway
Even a perfectly typed DNS entry can fail, and it's rarely the numbers themselves that are wrong. Hotel Wi-Fi almost always runs behind a captive portal, that login page asking for a room number and a last name before any device gets online. A Smart TV is bad at handling that page, and if it hasn't cleared the hotel's login screen yet, no DNS setting works, because the network is blocking everything until you sign in.
The fix, when that happens, is to bypass the hotel network altogether: turn on a mobile hotspot from your phone, connect the TV to that instead, and let Smart DNS do its job on a connection the hotel never gets to gatekeep. It's a similar idea to NordVPN Meshnet for secure remote work and file sharing — both essentially route around whatever restrictions the local network is trying to enforce. Some hotels go a step further and flag anything that looks like unusual DNS traffic, which is closer to how NordVPN obfuscated servers help with strict hotel Wi-Fi networks — obfuscation, in that context, means disguising VPN traffic as ordinary browsing, a heavier tool for a stricter network than most Smart DNS setups will ever run into.
Is It Worth the Ten Minutes of Remote-Control Rage?
For a TV you're only using a few nights, yes. It's faster to set up than pairing a travel router, and it doesn't touch anything on your phone or laptop. The clearest sign it worked isn't a message on the screen at all. It's whoever else is in the room noticing first.
My partner didn't glance up from a Teams call until the BBC iPlayer menu loaded properly on the first try, then stopped mid-sentence to ask why the TV suddenly looked British. That's really the only confirmation you need. Whether the goal is catching a home quiz show or trying to unblock Netflix Japan for anime while living in Mexico, Smart DNS is worth the ten minutes of fumbling with a hotel remote — right up until a captive portal gets in the way, at which point the phone-hotspot trick above is the faster fix, not another twenty minutes retyping the same two numbers.