ELI5- do streaming devices like Roku and Firestick draw more power when they’re actively streaming content vs just sitting on the home menu?
In: Technology
Absolutely! When your device is streaming video, it has to actively convert the video data from something that’s bundled up for sending long distances through the Internet into something that your TV can read and understand. That takes computational effort, which draws power.
Sitting on the home screen does take a tiny amount of computational power, but not nearly as much.
Try streaming a long movie in the highest definition you can and then feel your streaming device and see if it gets warm to the touch. That’s an indication that it’s working very hard and drawing lots of power to do its work.
To be completely clear, I don’t actually own one of these devices, so I can’t say for certain whether they actually *will* heat up enough for you to tell by feeling them. They could be designed to draw such low power and dissipate heat so effectively that you couldn’t notice by touch. But if they do heat up while in use, that would be evidence of the higher power draw.
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