My new telly has a usb socket on the back so I can watch shows from a memory stick. This works fine, but can I watch from an external hard drive?

Thanks in advance for your informed opinions

It might depend on the model. I had to format a hard drive for my Panasonic to record to. It means I can’t use it on another brand unless I reformat it if that makes sense.

It’s likely, try it and see! My Samsung does but it firstly depends on power, if your HDD draws power from the USB socket then there might not be enough juice there to get it to spin up. If the power isn’t an issue then you need to make its formatted to the tv requirements and then make sure the files are the right file type.

This sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Devices that can read from USB sometimes don’t supply enough power for a hard drive, or sometimes aren’t set up to read the larger storage sizes.