A streaming stick that buffers, stutters, or reboots itself halfway through an episode is one of the more maddening things a living room can throw at you, not least because the obvious suspect is rarely the guilty one. The reflex is to blame the Wi-Fi, restart the router, and grumble about the broadband, and sometimes that's fair.
Often, though, the stick isn't struggling to pull data at all. It's struggling to pull power, and the usual cause is the previously tidy-looking decision to run it from the USB port on the back of your TV rather than the wall. It sits beside plugging it into the wrong HDMI port as the sort of streaming stick mistake that hides in plain sight. It's easy to get wrong โ and, good news, a two-minute job to check.
Why a streaming stick runs out of power
Five watts, and a port that can't always spare them
Fire TV Sticks, including the 4K models, ask for very little: 5V at 1A, which is all of five watts, delivered through the wall adapter in the box. The trouble is that the USB port on a television was never built to be a reliable power supply. Plenty of them top out at half an amp, and even the better ones hover around that 1A line with no headroom to spare.
Feed a 4K stick from one of those, and it works, mostly, right up until the moment it's asked to do something more demanding like decode a 4K HDR stream, run a firmware update, or wake a dozen apps that…