Does viewing livestreams consume more data than doing so with a normal video?

Question

Let’s say both the livestream and the video are viewed in 480p. How much data would be consumed in 1 hour for each?

In: 263

Answer 1

1 hour of 720p 60fps video will consume the same amount of data regardless of whether it is live or not (assuming the same compression is used for both). However, there is a small difference.

With a livestream, the goal is to deliver the video to you constantly and quickly. So you will usually have a consistent bandwidth consumption with livestream (more or less).

Normal videos have 1 advantage – if your internet is fast enough, it can download part of the video early and store it in memory until they are ready to play. This is called “buffering” because the video player is building a buffer against short connection disruptions. Outside of technical use, the term buffering is usually only used when the buffer runs out, and the video has to wait for more of it to be downloaded before it can resume. Technically, however, videos are always buffering.

On a player like YouTube, it will allocate a certain buffer of, for example, 15 seconds. That whole buffer will fill quickly, taking up more bandwidth temporarily. Once the buffer is full, it will fill back up as it is consumed. At this point, the bandwidth will start to resemble a livestream. So it may be one quick “burst” and then normal bandwidth usage going on.

Of course, a buffer could be done differently. I could use a 15 second buffer, and only pull data when there are 10 seconds or fewer left. This would result in bursts of bandwidth every 5 seconds as the buffer refills. But with livestreams, a buffer isn’t really usable since you can’t grab “future content” that hasn’t happened yet.

Compression is another issue – a livestream can’t spend too much time compressing it’s data or it will add delay, whereas a normal video can spend a bit more time getting better compression. So, a normal video might use slightly less data thanks to better compression, but the difference between any two compression algorithms is going to be fairly small in most cases, even over the course of an hour.

Tldr; there are small differences in how the data is delivered, but ultimately, the total data over a longer period of time is going to be just about the same.