A while ago, my model A1469 3rd generation Apple TV had a slowly blinking white light but nothing displayed over HDMI any more, so I searched for Apple TV slow blinking white and
Reading Restoring your Apple TV (when its white light is flashing) | Comics and gadgets, I opted for the first option: a soft-restart of the Apple TV. To do that you have to press menu+down on the Apple Remote at the same time for 5+ seconds, then wait for the Apple TV to restart. That initially did show an image over HDMI which later disappeared. I didn’t get the image at first as I thought it was looking for iTunes media over USB (like from an iPhone or iPad), so I waited for a time-out to occur.
After a while that image disappeared and the Apple TV white LED started rapidly flashing. Not good.
Later I found the image was portraying a USB cable not having a connection to an iTunes logo and some dark grey text on a black background pointing to support.apple.com/appletv/restore.
I didn’t see that at first as the room was a bit brightly lit since we had a lot of sun that day so this non-descriptive image with grey on black UX worked really well.
Conclusion: I had to restore the Apple TV which I thought would be straight-forward as it had been connected to my iCloud account.







