Downloads

[395almira]

How many MB's should it take, on average, to download a 90 minute film from You Tube?

[Gwalk900]

Difficult to say with any certainty. Much would depend on the films resolution and on if Hughes could compress the download to any degree.

[BirdDog]

That all depends on the definition you are streaming. I found this chart here https://www.quora.com/How-much-data-does-a-YouTube-video-consume-1  which seems accurate from what I know. Note anything above 360p uses a significant amount of data for just 10 minutes viewing.

[curtis-m]

It will depend on quality but regardless you probably ought to budget 1.5gbs. Netflix says their average movie is about 1.5gbs and most are in the 90min range.

[Amanda]

Hello there

As everyone mentioned it really depends on the quality it was uploaded in, bitrate, etc. It may also depend on if you are using flash or Youtube's HTML5 viewer too, but not sure. For comparisons sake, we've connected an iPad to a HughesNet gen4 system in the lab over wifi and played Netflix HD videos non-stop during work hours until we exceeded our allowance, which took a few days on the 10GB plan. 

Thanks
Amanda

[BirdDog]

Amanda,

Wow, Netflix HD video that many hours and it took a few days to eat 10 GB?! Must be some serious compression going on between the iPad, HughesNet and Neflix because no way could I do that on my Smart TV or Android Tablets.

You had Neflix account set to HD right?

[Amanda]

Yep, we manually set it to HD. Crazy thing is that Liz and I also did a Skype video chat for about 2 hours in HD too and when we ran out of allowance and hit FAP we were still able to stream and Skype video chat with no issues. I was pretty surprised too.

[BirdDog]

Very strange, my experience with trying HD from Netflix doesn't come close to getting that much mileage. I haven't tried HD on Netflix for quite some time, maybe they have already improved their compression like they've been talking about.

Now I'll have to do some tests myself to see what happens.

PS: Maybe that node87 link is out of date on amounts used.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

[maratsade]

"we've connected an iPad to a HughesNet gen4 system in the lab over wifi and played Netflix HD videos non-stop during work hours until we exceeded our allowance, which took a few days on the 10GB plan. "

Can you get the same mileage using a laptop or PC?

[395almira]

Thanks for all your replies. My download settings on iSkySoft are at 360p which is quite satisfactorily for me. Normally a 90 min film would use about 500 MB. Lately it’s much higher with no apparent reason since I have done this before and have not experienced this erratic fluctuation.

[Amanda]

Highly doubtful, maratsade. The difference on that is because there are too many "moving parts" in a real computer/laptop than an iPad with a few apps on it. You'd throw away 200MB a day on just "services" related stuff on a computer.

[maratsade]

Looks like an iPad is the way to go for watching Netflix, then! I'm going to test this! Were you using a newer iPad? I have a 3rd gen or something, not one of the newest ones.

[Amanda]

No, it was an older model from about 2014, iPad mini I got for $100 on sale at Best Buy! We still use it here for testing out things like update download speeds 😉

[maratsade]

I'll test mine -- there's a use for the early morning while Bonus Bytes is till active. 🙂 I'll stream something and then see how much was used. It would be amazing if I could replicate your results!

[maratsade]

"we've connected an iPad to a HughesNet gen4 system in the lab over wifi and played Netflix HD videos non-stop during work hours until we exceeded our allowance, which took a few days on the 10GB plan. "

I tried this -- my iPad used the same amount of data as the laptop.