The table below from YouTube shows how much data is used per second. Watching videos in 360p for an hour will use only 60 megabytes of data. But watching videos in 4k for an hour might use 2.7GB of data on your plan or more if you’re watching on a higher frame rate.
Type | Video Bitrate, Standard Frame Rate (24, 25, 30) | Video Bitrate, High Frame Rate (48, 50, 60) |
2160p (4k) | 35-45 Mbps | 53-68 Mbps |
1440p (2k) | 16 Mbps | 24 Mbps |
1080p | 8 Mbps | 12 Mbps |
720p | 5 Mbps | 7.5 Mbps |
480p | 2.5 Mbps | 4 Mbps |
360p | 1 Mbps | 1.5 Mbps |
There are two ways data use on YouTube can be reduced on either mobile devices or your desktop PC’s.
The following steps will tell you how to reduce YouTube data usage on your mobile. These steps are great for people who often go out of their home and are away from their usual Wi-Fi connection and sometimes watch YouTube using mobile data.
Photo’s were taken on an Android device
Step 1: Open your YouTube app. Then take a look towards the top corner near where your profile picture is and click there.
Usually when you are at home you will watch YouTube on your PC. But sometimes if you have used a lot of data in your plan it can become easy to exceed it if you spend hours per day watching your favourite YouTube videos.
There is a way on PC to change the default video settings so they don’t go to more than you would want. Generally YouTube will try to stream its videos at the highest quality for internet speed, which is great for quality, but not for your data at times.
So here’s what you could do.
Step 1: Login to your YouTube Account
Step 2: Click on a video you would like to watch. Pause the video and take a look at the gear icon towards the bottom right of the video. Then click on that icon.
If you leave the room often and often leave YouTube running, it’s possible for it to keep playing for quite a long time. If the next video is a long one and if your video settings are set to 1080p then you might use a lot of data, even when you’re not even in the room at all!
To help stop this from happening you can check the “Autoplay” feature off and it won’t do that anymore on your PC.