Five years ago, I used to think that when you got a new 4K TV, all you needed to do was buy a 4K streaming stick online, and that was it. This was supposed to be the easy part — pick one with enough horsepower and plug it straight into the TV to get the best and sharpest stream possible.
Turns out there’s something far more important to check before spending a single dime on a streaming stick, and it has nothing to do with image quality or the TV’s panel itself. It does sound sort of obvious, but there are a couple of easy-to-miss bottlenecks that can completely undermine an otherwise perfectly good streaming setup. I learned that the hard way with my own living room TV, where buying better hardware wasn’t enough to solve the problem.
Your TV’s Wi-Fi speed matters the most in your setup
An expensive 4K streaming stick means nothing if your TV can’t use it
A perfectly good router, a faster internet connection, and the latest 4K streaming stick on the market won’t matter at all if you still end up watching Netflix buffer like it’s 2010. The best hardware will fail to give you a smooth experience if the culprit is the Wi-Fi connection your TV is getting (or not getting, to be more precise).
Your router’s advertised speed or the 1Gbps plan you’ve bought doesn’t matter here, either. What truly matters is the bandwidth that is actually reaching your TV. If your TV is tucked away in a…