How much mobile data does streaming media use?

The things most of us love to do with our phones is also the thing that eats the most data: stream music and video.To get more news about 39bet-phỏm miền bắc-tiến lên miền bắc-xóc đĩa-game bắn cá-bóng đá, you can visit official website.

Modern phones and streaming services were made for each other. Your phone is capable of delivering high-quality content through the screen or its audio components and streaming services like Disney+, Netflix and Spotify were made to deliver them. The first popular media-centric phone was the iPhone and both Apple and Google owe a lot of their success to this because it was also the best way to watch YouTube in the palm of your hands.

Things have come a long way since then, but one thing hasn't changed. We love to watch and listen with our phones. But the advent of HD video streaming and high-bitrate audio streaming means that it also gobbles up the data like never before. Let's break it down to see just how much data you use when you fire up your favorite streaming app.While some services offer super-HQ streaming music, most services use the same scale: Low, Normal, and High. Most also use the same bitrate (the number of bits per second that are transmitted digitally) to define each category. Here's how they look and how much data each will consume.

"Average" is the keyword here. Most services offer streaming that auto-adjusts based on your network conditions, and some use lower quality bitrates for all categories. But most any other service, including YouTube Music and Spotify, follow these guidelines when you don't have things set up to auto-adjust.

As you can imagine, streaming video uses a lot more data than audio does. There's just more information being transmitted. And your network conditions play a big part in how the media is streamed because nobody likes buffering. Thankfully, apps are smart enough to ask for a video stream that will work with the available network speeds and buffering is mostly a thing of the past. Mostly. Note that this hidden feature will usually override your settings when it has to, but if you ask for an HD or 4K video, you'll get it if it can be delivered.

One thing these figures show is that you're always better off using Wi-Fi to stream high-quality media. Besides the data savings, Wi-Fi also has a more robust signal that will mean less degradation or compression. Your internet company probably optimizes media traffic, but not nearly as much as your wireless carrier does. You can also use services that let you download or pin your media while you're on Wi-Fi and play it back later.

Just be aware that if you watch 8 hours of HD video every day, you're going to need upwards of 300GB of data. That means you'll need an unlimited plan that doesn't have the fine-print telling you "unlimited" stops at 22 or 24GB then gets too slow to stream. Such an animal doesn't exist, and carriers that zero-rate aren't going to serve you 2K video (or even 1080p) without paying extra for it.