The title is misleading, he pulled off the hack using his smartphone, the hotel TV was just a monitor. Also giving a hacker a smartphone is as good as giving them a PC, not sure what the authorities were thinking.
The indecision by authorities as to whether or not he should be prosecuted reminds me of "infomaster" back in the 90s. The Feds basically let him get away with hacking because they didn't think he was mentally competent. There's a book about him called "At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion".