Best wired TV streamers to save your home Wi-Fi bandwidth

Since you're stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic you're probably in the same boat as everyone else: streaming more TV shows and movies. Services like Netflix, YouTube and Disney Plus have throttled their video quality to help ease the strain on national networks, but what about the strain on your home network? Streaming is among the most bandwidth-intensive activities and with kids distance learning, grownups videoconferencing and everyone watching more TV to unwind -- often, all at once -- your Wi-Fi connection could struggle.

If your home network is having issues you could try disconnecting your streaming device from Wi-Fi. Using Ethernet instead, via a Cat-5 network cable, frees up your wireless network for other devices like laptops and tablets. Ethernet is also more stable and faster than Wi-Fi and doesn't have issues with walls, interference or distance (well, not in a house anyway).

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The bad news is that you'll need to run wires from your router to your TV(s), but now that you're stuck at home it makes a good project, and Ethernet cable is cheap. I ran a cable from the router in my basement to my TV entertainment center upstairs and it was easy, and now all of my main streaming devices are wired, not Wi-Fi. During these heavy-usage times you might even be OK running a temporary wire that you plan to remove later.

The other issue? While many game consoles and smart TVs have Ethernet ports built in, most of the best media streamers are Wi-Fi only, although some work with a cheap adapter. Here's a list of our favorite streaming devices that either have built-in Ethernet ports or work with Ethernet adapters. Note that all of the products below also work via Wi-Fi.