Streaming video sites and bandwidth caps.

[Seth1968]

With the growing popularity of streaming video online, how is this going to affect our internet service?

With all the extra bandwidth use, are ISP's going to charge a heck of a lot more?

I'm with Telus and I'm capped at 400 GB a month. I spoke with a Telus rep who said they are going to start charging customers for exceeding their limit.

How do you think this is all going to play out?

[schocker]

400 is already quite a bit. I think out east they get stupid low amounts. Shaw and telus has been saying for years though that they will charge for overages. I believe shaw has like $10/month more for unlimited and if you exceed your limit they just bump you onto that iirc. I have never hit my 400gb but in December hit 350.

[Seth1968]

People out East can afford internet service? Why the hell are we sending them transfer payments? lol

Here's a breakdown of how much bandwidth a typical movie uses:

Netflix Movies (HD): These guys are around 3.8Mbit, which means it's about 3600MB for a 2 hour HD movie.

Netflix Movies (SD): Each of these movies are around 500-700MB each, depending on the length of the movie.

Netflix TV Shows (HD): A 30-minute TV show will be about 1500MB.

Netflix TV Shows (SD): A 30-minute TV show will be about 400MB.

[rage2]

So I consider my household to be on the extreme end of online streaming. We have 2 Apple TV's, WDTV, and various other devices for streaming video. Often, we have both TV's watching different movies on AppleTV. We buy/rent all our new movies from iTunes, watch TV from Hulu, Netflix, HBO Go, and BBC iPlayer. Personally, I watch at least 2 movies a day off my iTunes movie library while I'm working, and before bed. The only thing we watch on satellite are newer TV shows that aren't online quick enough, and sports.

With that being said, my usage on Shaw in the last few months have been:

329GB
209GB
207GB
478GB
305GB
335GB

The 478GB was an exception, there was a lot of rebuilding/upgrading that month for all our iDevices and laptops, as well as PS4/Xbox1 game purchases, which involved tons of cloud sync which drove our usage up. So 400GB for purely watching TV/Movies (all in HD) is really tough to hit for us. We're pretty bleeding edge here, and have embraced this whole cloud thing, so I don't think there are many households out there that are much more extreme than we are.

My parents have some magic box that watches Chinese tv channels, they always forget to turn it off, and they're able to hit 450gb a month when left on 24/7. They turn it off now when not watching and it's dropped significantly.

Every thread I've seen people go over their limits is from torrenting or newsgroup hoarding content. If you are legitimately streaming video, the bandwidth caps are fine. For the record, I'm at 1TB a month for cap, nowhere near it.

[speedog]

Wow, our family of 6 (kids 15-22) only averages 131GB per month with November, 2013 being the heaviest in the last 6 months at 170GB.

[blairtruck]

i go over my 400gb with Shaw all the time. probably 3-4 times a year for many years. never heard a peep.
like 15+ years ago telus dsl dropped me as a customer for always going over.

[rage2]

Originally posted by blairtruck
i go over my 400gb with Shaw all the time. probably 3-4 times a year for many years. never heard a peep.
like 15+ years ago telus dsl dropped me as a customer for always going over.
So out of curiosity, what do you do that uses so much bandwidth?

Just trying to correlate usage types vs bandwidth.

[Darell_n]

I watch one or more TV episodes per day and a couple of movies per week all at 720p HD and DTS sound and my monthly average is around 140GB, 250 is my cap with Shaw.

[Crazyjoker77]

I didn't even know Shaw had a limit as I'm defiantly destroying 400gb a month for a long time. This month is gonna be especially bad since I got a new laptop and downloaded over a terabyte off steam last weekend alone. Add on top of that probably 2 blue rays rips a night.

I don't stream a whole lot as a prefer to just torrent the whole season over night and watch without buffering or quality drops. really the only streaming I do a lot of is streaming youtube for music videos(on hd of course)

What is suppose to happen at that cap as I've never noticed anything and shaw has never mentioned anything ever. I just have their basic package for cable,internet and phone.

[blairtruck]

Originally posted by rage2

So out of curiosity, what do you do that uses so much bandwidth?

Just trying to correlate usage types vs bandwidth.
sickbeard and couch potato.
i only let couch get 1080 movies and they are 10-15gig and then all the tv shows. are like 1.5gigs for like 6-7 shows a night.
latley couch has been snatching movies that have a password. so first download fails cause passworded then it grabs the next. so that error could be 20 gigs.

[Mibz]

Originally posted by Crazyjoker77
downloaded over a terabyte off steam last weekend alone. I'm pretty sure I'd have to install my entire library to get to 1TB of required storage, what the hell games are you playing?

My monthly stats since July:
146
184
194
247
210
524
328

I seriously have no idea where that 524 came from. I'm going through my downloads for that period and have nothing to account for it. The 328 includes downloading all 5 seasons of the League and a few movie marathons. I usually only have two or three games installed at a time and there's no way any game I played required that much usage.

I'm seriously at a loss here.