As for network connectivity, the whole Sony Android TV line-up features a 100mpbs Ethernet port only and up to 802.11ac Wi-Fi with 2x2 MIMO rated at 866mbps (on 80MHz wide channels). This looks perfectly sufficient for media streaming at first glance. However, Ultra HD Blu-ray specifies up to 128mpbs which disqualifies the Ethernet port right away. Question is though, whether you really want to waste 80-100GB per movie on your media server, not to mention streaming it off the internet.
With 802.11ac 2x MIMO, you are supposed to theoretically get real world data rates of up to 430mbps at optimal conditions. A bottleneck which cuts the maximum throughput in half on Sony right away is that the Wi-Fi controller seems to internally be hooked up to the SoC via USB 2.0 only. Sony probably cut some costs here by not adding an USB 3.0 hub controller.
In order to test network playback performance, I used the
jellyfish bitrate files. For Ultra HD Blu-ray compliancy, I even went up to the 120mbps (17.5MB/s) sample. Even though that sounds like overkill, 4K@60fps means quite some data, even for HEVC/VP9 with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling.
The samples were streamed off of Windows and Linux based servers with various protocols such as DLNA, SMB and NFS. Kodi has been used as the primary player on the Sony TV.
I first tried to play the sample off of a fast USB 3.0 HDD in order to verify that the MT5890 is capable of decoding HEVC Main 10 High@Level 5.1 at such a high bitrate. I also stress-tested my network infrastructure (server ⇒ Gibt Ethernet Switch ⇒ Wi-Fi access point ⇒ Wi-Fi client station) to rule out any potential bottleneck. All tests went well with the network achieving a stable 300-400mbps (TCP traffic) over 802.11ac at the same distance as the Sony TV in direct line of sight of the access point.
The Sony TV however didn’t even come close to the throughput achieved by the other 802.11ac clients I tried. While
WiFi Speed Test, downloading data via TCP from the server to the Sony TV, attested a staggering 100mbps on average with previous firmware versions, Nougat at least raised the bar to a stable 200mbps.
As for playing back the jellyfish bitrate files over Wi-Fi, the Nougat based Sony TV for the first time played the 120mbps sample just fine via various servers and protocols from within Kodi. But the weak ARM cores have pretty much been maxed out. Keep in mind that the sample is 30fps only. I am quite confident that the TV would have stumbled at 60fps.
So still beware that those TVs have primarily been designed to play those heavily compressed 24p Netflix and Prime Video streams.
I haven’t performed any range tests. Access point and Sony TV have been positioned about 4-5m from each other in direct line of sight. Throughput might drastically decrease with distance and obstacles in between your TV and the access point.
