Something I’m becoming increasingly familiar with via Pocket-lint is the age of different tech standards. Without even looking, for instance, I know that the first home theater adaptation of Dolby Atmos was in 2014. Apple first started using Lightning in 2012 alongside the iPhone 5, and clung onto it for over a decade, only switching entirely over to USB-C once regulations forced it to catch up with the times or risk losing the European market.

USB 2.0 is ancient in technology terms. The format dates back to April 2000 — an entire generation of adults has never known a world without it, and the latest USB tech is actually USB 4 v2. Nevertheless, you can still find 2.0 ports on many TVs, an attempt by electronics makers to boost profit margins wherever possible.

The good news, in a manner of speaking, is that they can get away with it because there’s still some value within USB 2.0’s limitations. I’ll show you what you can and can’t do.

What USB 2.0 can do on your TV

A surprising amount, but with major gaps

The first thing to explain is the format’s specs, and how weak they are relative to what you could be getting. USB 2.0 data transmission tops out at 480Mbps (megabits per second), which sounds incredibly fast in relation to your internet connection. USB 3.0, however, is capable of 5Gbps (gigabits per second), over 10 times faster. USB 4 v2 meanwhile operates at 80Gbps, and can push up 120Gbps if it sacrifices some bandwidth in the opposite direction. That’s so fast that hypothetically, you could plug an external GPU into your TV and start playing Resident Evil or Fortnite — if your TV’s CPU and software could keep up.

Power-wise, USB 2.0 tops out at 2.5W. That’s less energy than you need for a single 810-lumen smart bulb. On the flip side, USB-C ports with the USB Power Delivery 3.1 spec can handle up to 240W when a manufacturer allows it, which may be more power than your entire TV consumes. If companies really took advantage of USB’s progress, you could run a gaming laptop off a TV using a single cable, no HDMI or power brick required.

In some circumstances, USB 2.0 is barely enough to power a streaming stick from Amazon or Roku. Don’t count on it, however. Processors and Wi-Fi radios have improved considerably over the years, so even something like the Roku Streaming Stick 4K will sometimes spike to between 3.5 and 5W. You should be able to run the base (1080p, non-HDR) Streaming Stick, but you may be better off connecting to wall power anyway, since the device will have to cold-boot every time you turn your TV back on.

You should able to charge something like your smartphone over USB 2.0 if you’re desperate. Expect things to be lethargic. An iPhone 17, for example, might take up to 8 hours to charge from 0 to 100%. Using 25W MagSafe, you could do the same thing in 90 minutes, and that’s accounting for slowed-down charging past 80% to preserve battery health. As if the speed difference wasn’t bad enough, you’d have to leave your TV on the entire time.

A far better use of your USB 2.0 port is an offline movie drive. All smart TVs have some sort of native media playback app, so if you can load a USB drive full of movies and TV shows, you can watch them without any subscription fees, or even turning to media server software like Plex or Jellyfin. There are some catches to this, naturally — you need to download and/or rip videos to a computer, organize their folders and filenames, and in some cases convert files to a format your TV recognizes. Once you’ve copied files to the drive and plugged it into the TV, 480Mbps is fast enough to handle 4K. It’s really the TV and your drive that are the limiting factors. I recommend choosing an external SSD instead of something like a thumb stick — most thumb drives don’t have enough space for a meaningful library (upwards of 256GB), and an SSD will guarantee that you’re maxing out what performance you have.

Browsing photos or listening to music from a USB drive is trivial as long as you temper your expectations. You probably won’t be listening to lossless tracks, or have access to advanced sorting or playlist functions. Still, this can be handy in a pinch, say if you need to present photos to a client and you don’t want to use your laptop.

One rare use you may not have considered is updating your TV’s firmware. Doing this via USB drive is usually redundant, since TVs can update themselves via the internet. If you’re deliberately leaving your TV offline, however, check a manufacturer’s website to see how you can download, copy, and run the latest installer file.

The last thing worth mentioning is Ethernet. When your Wi-Fi is unreliable, you should be able to buy a gigabit Ethernet-to-USB adapter to give your TV a stable internet connection. You can’t get true gigabit speeds over USB 2.0, but 480Mbps is roughly on par with a lot of Wi-Fi links, and faster than the 100Mbps built-in Ethernet jacks some TVs have. That’s another area where manufacturers could stand to pick up the pace.

Capacity

1TB

Connection

USN-C

Portable

Yes