I've never dug deep into this, but the normal argument is that it's possible to saturate a 100Mbps link with a single 4K Blu-ray stream. Even if most people will never hit that limit, it would be nice for a top of the line 4K TV to support "normal" (for some media-savvy folks) 4K streams.
But that's not a very compelling argument on its own, since the Ethernet link is just one link in the chain. Having a gigabit port doesn't help much if the TV can't handle decoding video at those bitrates in real time. It's definitely possible that TV manufacturers choose 100Mbps ports because they know the TV can't deal with huge streams for other reasons.
It's an interesting situation for the manufacturers. Even if 99.9% of buyers will never see streams above 100Mbps, and even if that other 0.1% can't effectively use them, it might be worth it to bump the port to gigabit since complaints about 100Mbps ports come up so often in reviews and in online discussions. Maybe throwing in a borderline useless gigabit port would generate enough sales to justify the marginal BOM cost increase.
As an example, my TV has a 100mbps network port - I thought I was being smart, and plugged my TV into a wired network cable. It kept buffering on a large 4k movie, which confused me because it had been working fine over wifi.
Finally realized my wifi was faster than 100mbps, and hence handled the stream fine, but wired couldn't keep up.
> I've never dug deep into this, but the normal argument is that it's possible to saturate a 100Mbps link with a single 4K Blu-ray stream.
Are people really keeping and 123Mbps or 144Mbps (the two >100Mbps options) 4K Blu-ray rips? The largest 100GB triple layer disc can't even hold 2 hours of video at those rates. Realistically you'll max out at 72Mbps or 92Mbps on 4K discs.
But that's not a very compelling argument on its own, since the Ethernet link is just one link in the chain. Having a gigabit port doesn't help much if the TV can't handle decoding video at those bitrates in real time. It's definitely possible that TV manufacturers choose 100Mbps ports because they know the TV can't deal with huge streams for other reasons.
It's an interesting situation for the manufacturers. Even if 99.9% of buyers will never see streams above 100Mbps, and even if that other 0.1% can't effectively use them, it might be worth it to bump the port to gigabit since complaints about 100Mbps ports come up so often in reviews and in online discussions. Maybe throwing in a borderline useless gigabit port would generate enough sales to justify the marginal BOM cost increase.