The presence of the internet has changed people’s approaches toward most things in life. This is increasingly obvious as people take to streaming videos online instead of downloading to their devices. The advantages of streaming videos are innumerable and this is why it is becoming preferential for most people. However, video streaming uses data. Data is not cheap to get. This is why you should try to find out how much data your video streaming service costs.
One of the top companies setting the pace for online video streaming is Netflix. With thousands of movies and television shows available at just a click, there is little stopping you from watching all you ever wanted to. Oops! Did I say nothing? Actually, there is the little issue of data. As most internet providers are interested in making a profit for themselves, it is a surety that most people are on a capped data plan. This means that once you reach a particular limit, your internet subscription expires. It is therefore, important to know how much data your streaming service is costing you in order to regulate your data use. This article will provide the necessary information on what you need to know about how much data Netflix uses when you watch videos on the platform.
To fully understand how much data you use up on Netflix, you have to understand how video streaming consumes data. When you stream a video online, it consumes data based on two things; the length of the video, and the resolution or quality of the video. These two factors work together to affect the amount of data Netflix uses. Once you comprehend the mechanism of how these two factors work, you will begin to see how they contribute to data consumption and how to use them to control the amount of data you lose to video streaming.
The resolution of a video determines how much data streaming that particular video consumes. This is obvious in the size of videos when downloaded. A video of higher quality is always larger than a lower quality video. And video quality is determined by the video resolution. This applies the same way to streaming. A video of higher screen resolution takes more data to stream than a video with a lower resolution. Resolution is measured in pixels (p). So, the quality of videos is stated in this unit. The resolution of a standard definition video starts at 480p. Then, there are higher quality videos of 720p, 1020p, HD and ultra HD.
As important as the video resolution is, the time taken to view a video is as important. The amount of data used by Netflix is roughly calculated by the hour. Different resolutions have different amount of estimated data consumption per hour. On a low bandwidth setting of 240p, about 300 megabytes (MB) of data is used per hour. About 700MB is consumed with the resolution 480p while as much as 7 gigabytes (GB) of data can be used up on the ultra HD setting.
