virgahyatt wrote:The point of taking it off of ethernet was to connect it to a different network (hotspot) so that it might be able to reach the apple activation servers. Once it's connected to that hotspot and successfully activated you can either reconnect via ethernet or connect to the normal wifi network.
And this is exactly what my father did. Activation with iPhone Hotspot and the home WiFi
As for what happened during the setup. I'm not sure what you mean by no DHCP. DHCP should be enabled on both the router and the apple tv. DHCP means that the router assigns the IP information to the devices on the network automatically. On the Apple TV, DHCP (or Automatic) tells the Apple TV to expect to get that information automatically instead of having to manually enter it all like we used to decades ago.
FYI, the Hue bridge should not have caused any issues on your network if things were setup properly.
Without DHCP I mean exactly "without DHCP"; it means that he configured a static IP address and did not use DHCP