It sounds counterintuitive, I know. Usually the main concern is whether your Wi-Fi is holding back your home theater, not the other way around. Bad Wi-Fi performance can after all interrupt audio and video streams, or force them down to lower resolutions and bitrates. If you're lucky enough to have wireless surround sound, disruptions can lead to sync problems, or satellite speakers dropping out entirely.
You do have to be mindful, though, of just how your TV is behaving on your network if you want other devices to operate smoothly. This can be critical if your house is full of smart home accessories — in a worst-case scenario, you could find some accessories being bumped offline. This should all make more sense shortly.
Why is your smart TV a potential bottleneck?
The vagaries of home networks
There are a few ways in which a TV can become a burden, the most obvious being raw bandwidth consumption. Streaming a video at 1080p resolution doesn't consume much data, even with HDR (high dynamic range) active. But once you step up to 4K, you need a minimum of 25Mbps (megabits per second), and ideally 50Mbps or more to prevent any buffering or artifacts. Any modern router should be capable of handling a 4K stream — but if other people are trying to watch video, play games, or download large files, your Twin Peaks binge could be limiting the bandwidth available to them….