𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒆𝒍

yeah, but you don’t work if you watch a movie on a TV, op didn’t mention multi user environment where laptop would do both at the same time

yeah, unfortunately with NAS it probably won’t be as easy as connecting via usbc/thunderbolt and using it as a DAS, you’d need a proper network connection, you know, ethernet dongle, network setup, sharing etc.

I’d use a NAS connected to a router via a cable, everything else could be used wirelessly, AFAIK TVs wired network cards are shitty and wireless in many cases will be faster anyway (on of my TVs has 100Mb NIC…), if you want it cheap then buy some n100 based barebone NAS/router and install the NAS/RAID software solution by yourself, like TrueNAS (Scale recommended), unraid, proxmox, OpenMediaVault or… xpenology, for example i bought AOOSTAR R1, bought 2 4TB disks and installed xpenology, jellyfin hardware transcoding works with some tinkering (mainly reading documentation, not even touching any command line), mine looks nice near the TV and router

why not? technically MBP is more than capable of transcoding on the fly without breaking sweat, even a N100 based nas would do it in HW, the user experience of using a laptop for that is another thing