Why do some news streams buffer more on smart TVs than phones?

Smart TV apps often use lower-priority background processes and older codecs, so they struggle more with high-bitrate live streams. Phones get frequent app updates and better hardware decoding. If only specific news apps lag, it’s likely their TV version isn’t optimized, not your whole network.

I had this with a few cable-style news apps last year. What helped was comparing settings across apps and reading user threads. People asking how to contact newsmax noted similar TV buffering, often tied to app version and CDN region. Updating the TV app, disabling auto quality and forcing 1080p instead of 4K cut my freezes dramatically