How much data is consumed watching a video on YouTube ?

YouTube uses mobile data. Apart from making calls or SMS, most of the work done by the smartphone consumes data. However, your phone should not be connected to Wi-Fi at that time. While using the messaging app WhatsApp, using social media accounts, streaming music on Spotify and watching videos, the average user's phone consumes data. Therefore, reducing data usage has become a very important issue for many.

Video is much more complicated than downloading photos from the Internet or streaming audio. Therefore, video consumes more data. This does not only apply to YouTube, other video streaming platforms are also consuming data.

In particular, the YouTube mobile app supports videos from 144p to 2160p (4K quality). But in terms of 4K video, there should be a phone that supports this quality. YouTube's streaming help page has information on how many bytes of video to keep for the streaming quality option. Based on that, it has been calculated how much data the video consumes in what quality.

YouTube recommends 500 to 2000 kbps bitrate for 480p video (standard quality). Here let's consider the average of these two pixels to be 1250 Kbps.

If you divide 1250 kbps (Kilobits per second) by 1000, you get 1.25 Mbps (Megabits per second). Since there are 8 bits in a byte, dividing 1.25 Mbps by 8 gives 0.156 megabytes per second. Multiplying this number by 60 seconds, a 480p video consumes 9.375 MB of data per minute on YouTube.

YouTube also supports HDR video. Such videos consume additional data. If you calculate all these types of videos, the calculation will be very long. When watching videos with limited data purchase, content is more important than quality.

- 144 P: YouTube has not provided bitrate.

- 250p: 225 MB per hour.

- 360p: 315 MB per hour.

- 480p: 562.5 MB per hour.

- 720 fps @ 30 fps: 1237.5 MB per hour.

- 720p @60 fps: 1856.25 MB per hour.

- 1080p @ 30 fps: 2.03 GB per hour.

- 1080p @60 fps: 3.04 GB per hour.

- 1440p (Tuke) @30fps: 4.28GB per hour.

- 1440p (Tuke) @60 fps: 6.08 GB per hour.

- 2160p (4K) @ 30 fps: 10.58 GB per hour.

- 2160p (4K) @60 fps: 15.98 GB per hour.

480p is generally considered to be 'Standard Definition' (SD). 1080p is considered as 'Full HD' quality. And most YouTube channels upload videos of this quality.