How much Internet do you consume to watch a YouTube video? That is what we are going to deal with in this article. Sometimes it is important to know, since you could exhaust your mobile data if you do not control how much you consume and watch, for example, an hour-long video. You will see that it depends on several factors and you could even configure it to save data and not run out. You can take the same into account for other Streaming platforms where you go to watch videos.
Basically, consuming more or less Internet data when watching a YouTube video will depend on the quality of the image, as well as the time. A 4K video is not the same as a 480p video, for example. Nor is it the same to see 5 minutes as 5 hours. For this article we are going to use a video that lasts an hour as an example.
How much does a YouTube video consume?
The Internet consumption of a YouTube video will be the same if we are using a Wi-Fi network, connected by cable or through mobile data. However, it is in the latter case that we must be more careful. If you’re on a capped rate, data can run out without you realizing it.
If you enter the youtube help page, you will be able to see the bitrate that the platform recommends based on the quality. This is important. What does this mean? It is what allows us to calculate the amount of data you will need. For example, for 720p quality it recommends a bit rate between 1500 and 4000 Kbps. For 480 quality it recommends 500 to 2000 Kbps or for 4K quality it recommends 13,000 to 34,000 Kbps.
If we take 720p quality, which is quite common, we can use an average of 2750 Kbps. We can translate it to 2.75 Mbps which, when divided by 8 to convert it to megabytes, would be 0.3437 megabytes per second. A minute would consume about 20.62 MB and an hour would be about 1,237 MB. Basically, an hour of YouTube video at that quality and with that average bitrate that we have put, would use up a little more than 1 GB of data.
But of course, what happens if we use the highest quality 4K? In this case, always according to YouTube recommendations, I would use an average of 23,500 Kbps for a 2160p video at 30FPS. Doing the same account, we would spend 10 GB of data every hour of video playback. A significant amount if we compare it with the 720p quality.
Quality control is key
Therefore, as you can see, it is important to correctly control the playback quality of YouTube videos. If you are at home connected to Wi-Fi and have good coverage, it does not matter if you put it in 4K. You will not run out of data, since you will connect to your router with fiber optics and it does not matter if you consume more or less.
On the other hand, if you are going to connect from the phone, through mobile data, it is essential that you be careful with the quality of the video that you are going to put on. Nowadays, thanks to 5G and 4G, you can watch 4K videos without any problems. But that can cause your fare to run out quickly. In the example we have given, you could spend 10 GB simply with one hour of video. If you have a limited rate, more or less than that capacity, you can melt it down in a while.
Although the normal thing today is to have rates of about 100GB and even unlimited, since many of them are included with fiber optics, it is possible that you do not have unlimited data and you find yourself with this terrible surprise. To control consumption, our advice is to use 480p or 720p quality. For the mobile phone it may be more than enough to watch videos correctly and you will be better controlling data consumption. This will prevent your rate from running out, without you realizing it.
In the event that you are away from home and want to watch videos intensively, our recommendation is that you connect to an open WiFi network so as not to waste your data, but as long as you do it with a VPN to avoid possible security problems. We must bear in mind that connecting to public WiFi networks entails a fairly large risk because Man in the Middle attacks could be carried out on us very easily, in fact, they could redirect us to malicious websites with the aim of infecting our PC or mobile with malware. If you are looking for a free VPN service, our recommendation is that you use Cloudflare’s WARP or Google One’s VPN, both will allow us to have the best possible security, while being quite careful with personal data. You can also opt for paid VPN services to bypass regional blocks and many other advanced features.
