Two of the most popular services online which most of the people love to are streaming music and streaming videos.
Nowadays, it just looks like modern smartphones and online streaming services are a perfect match made in heaven. With technology improving day by day, our smartphones are now more and more capable of delivering high-quality content through their screens and speakers.
Everyone loves to stream, watch, and listen with their phones, but keep in mind that online streaming comes at a cost and that cost is your Internet Data.
Let’s have a look at how much data Audio and Video streaming use on Low, Normal, and High Quality.
Audio Streaming
Most of the audio streaming services offer three tiers of streaming, Low, Normal and High. And this depends upon the bitrate of the audio.
Low Quality:
- Low-Quality Audio is mostly 96 kbps.
- On Average, Low-Quality Audio streaming will gobble anywhere around 0.70-0.75 MB per minute or 43-45 MB per hour.
Normal Quality:
- Normal-Quality Audio is mostly 160 kbps.
- On Average, Normal-Quality Audio streaming will use around 1.20 MB per minute or 72MB per hour.
High Quality:
- High-Quality Audio is 320 kbps.
- On Average, Normal-Quality Audio streaming will use around 2.49 MB per minute or 115.2MB per hour.
These are AVERAGE results only and the results can vary according to your streaming service.
Video Streaming
As video streaming transmits more information than audio streaming so, it uses a lot more data than audio streaming and it also depends upon your network conditions too.
Everyone wants smooth video streaming. No one wants to wait for the buffering to be completed. Thankfully, apps now offer adaptive rates due to which the video itself adapts to your internet connection speed.
Let’s breakdown the data that video streaming uses on average.
Low Quality:
- Low-Quality video is usually 240p or 320p and on average it will use about 300 MB per hour.
SD Quality:
- SD or Standard Quality is of 480p and on average it uses about 700 MB per hour.
HD Quality:
- HD Quality video can range anywhere from 720p to 2K and each option will use a different amount of data.
- 720p will use about 0.9 GB per hour.
- 1080p will use about 1.5 GB per hour.
- 2K will use about 3 GB per hour.
Ultra HD:
- A 4K video stream will use about 7.2 GB of data per hour.
All of the numbers are AVERAGES and the results may vary according to your streaming service, compression, variable quality based on network condition and your phone’s cache.