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These Streaming Devices Turn Any TV Into a 4K Beast

Are you sure that 4K television of yours is actually able to stream 4K movies and TV shows?

By Matt Jancer | Reviewed by Ysolt Usigan

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You’ve got the 4K TV. You even made sure to check that the movie you’re going to fire up says “4K” on it. You’re about to ease back into your couch and let that glorious screen’s 8,294,400 pixels stream their beautiful vibrant light right through your corneas. What else do you need, right?

Wouldn’t it be funny if you had all that, and yet an oversight meant you were watching 720p or 1080p all along instead? Funny, funny, funny. Well, not that funny. Only if it’s happening to someone else, but not you. You made sure you had a 4K-capable streaming device, and that if you decided to bypass the TV’s built-in streaming interface—many of which can be pretty awful—and plug in that old streaming stick you had lying around, it was explicitly designed for 4K, right?

Getting nervous? Here’s how you can grab control over your TV’s streaming capabilities by choosing the service you like best. Whether your TV has a proprietary streaming interface that just plain sucks, or if it comes with, say, Fire TV built into it and you’d prefer Apple TV, here’s what to know about streaming devices that’ll let you enjoy that brilliant, dazzling 4K the right way.

the best 4k streaming devices at a glance

Best Overall: Roku Ultra 4K

For the Traveler: Roku Streaming Stick 4K

I plugged ’em into my TV and watched a bunch of movies and TV shows on them. Speed was important when I was judging each streaming box and streaming stick. Not just its speed when playing the films and episodes themselves, but also when navigating through the menus. Just like how a slow computer can make the simplest tasks maddeningly frustrating, so too can a slow streaming device. Menus had to be intuitive and easy to navigate, too. The best user interfaces (UIs) didn’t bury commonly used functions behind a lot of screens.

Remote controls are underappreciated when it comes to streaming devices, even though you’ll have it in your hand a lot. I care more about the remotes than the devices themselves, which hide behind a TV or sit on a shelf, and so I judged their comfort in the palm, as well as the number and types of buttons on them and how well their voice search functioned. They needed to be easy to charge, and I appreciated features such as backlights and shortcut buttons.

To reduce variables in each device’s testing, I ran them all through a TCL QM7, a 55-inch 4K TV with support for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision; it’s the immediate predecessor of the TCL QM7K. I paired it with a Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar (via the TCL’s HDMI eARC port) and Sonos Sub 4 subwoofer. The same high-speed Verizon FIOS fiber-optic internet was used for the internet connection on all devices.

Best Overall: Roku Ultra 4K

Of all the streaming services,........

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