Lightning strike

Last night there was a big ol’ lighting storm over atop us. And there was strike in the back hill. No more than maybe a hundred feet from us. (Yes, I saw the strike)

The the TV went out. I got it back to working before I went to bed, but it was perplexing. The Apple TV and TiVo, the HDMI switch, and the TV were all fine in the end.

Today I went to a deeper dive of the problem.

The cause?

The HDMI cable bit it.

The cable?

Yes. Because at this point many cables are active components. They have transceivers on them to adapt the official signals to something a bit different. (Possibly a different impedance, or just a crap-ton of signal conditioning)

The strike was able to induce enough current on what is effectively an antenna to kill it.

It’s just a weird thing to even consider that something that for nearly its entire existence was a passive component to fail in such a way.