I had never wanted to stream Amazon Prime music for very long because I thought it would eat up a lot of data. But this month I haven't used up a lot of my data so I thought I'd test it.
I streamed music for over 2 hours straight and I didn't see a change in the meter. I guess it doesn't use much data at all!
Music/audio streaming generally should not use much, it is the video that is the killer.
I was amazed when I tested Netflix the other night when speed was around 800 kbps and could stream in low definition. It took about 90 seconds for it to load but then played fine with no buffering. Makes me sctratch my head sometimes.
Maratside,
Audio alone wont use much data, but, it can take awhile for data use to reflect on your allowance.
Consider this, a 5 minute song might be about 3 to 7MB depending on codec and bitrate. A video of the same length can easily be 50-100MB depending on codec and bitrate of both the audio and video contained.
Thanks,
C0RR0SIVE
@C0RR0SIVE, Oh, I know data is being used -- it's just that I was used to seeing the meter go down quickly when playing videos, and I was being frugal with the music -- but was pleasantly surprised that I can stream a lot of that.
@BirdDog, I can also stream videos just fine even though the speed is not ideal. It may take a bit to load up, but then it plays just fine.
I knew audio streaming as a relatively small hit to the data but was pleasantly surprised how much audio streaming I could do with my Echo Dots (connected to BT speakers) without much of a dent in my data consumption. In fact, the whole Echo experience makes very little impact.
@monicakm wrote:I knew audio streaming as a relatively small hit to the data but was pleasantly surprised how much audio streaming I could do with my Echo Dots (connected to BT speakers) without much of a dent in my data consumption. In fact, the whole Echo experience makes very little impact.
That's very cool!
I wrote that nearly a year ago. I'm still pleasantly surprised at how much music and talk radio I can stream on (I've now moved on to Google Homes) and not see a big dent in my data consumption. What does take a big hit are the devices themselves when speeds take a nose dive. A smart home refuses to cooperate when Internet speeds take a hit. Keeping my fingers crossed those numbers stay HIGH! 🙂