Bandwith Usage from Watching Streams

brian2sk8t

United States192 Posts

June 15 2012 17:47 GMT

I work at a facility with moderately monitored bandwith usage and network activity, and was concerned with figuring out the bandwith usage of watching streams on twitch and own3d, and if they are decently safe to watch in free time without attracting excessive bandwith usage numbes, etc. etc.

TLDR: How much bandwith does watching streams work and will i get in trouble if i continue to do so at work?

Grobyc

Canada18410 Posts

June 15 2012 18:03 GMT

It depends on the streams bitrate, which depends on its overall quality (and vice versa). It varies quite a bit, but for rough estimates:
480p = .85Kbps - 1Mbps
720p = 1.5Mbps - 2.5Mbps
1080p = 3Mbps - 4.5Mbps

There's 8 bits in a byte, so watching a stream with a bitrate of 1.5Mbps is about .187MBps. If you watch a 720p stream for 4 hours a day approximately, that's 14400 seconds. .187 * 14400 = 2692.8MB, or 2.62GB (megabytes) of your bandwidth used that day. If you watch that much streams every day of the month, assuming 30 days in a month, you've used 78GB of your bandwidth.

Replace starting bitrate and amount of hours a day you watch streams and you can estimate how much bandwidth you use watching streams.

I have no idea how strict your work is about that kind of policy; not a question TL can answer. If you watch it for like an hour or 2 5 days a week then that's maybe like 35-40GB. If they monitor bandwidth usage they might wonder where that's coming from and look in to it.

edit: So if you're worried, watch 360p or 480p streams. 720p-1080p maybe not such a great idea.

theBALLS

Singapore2935 Posts

June 15 2012 18:05 GMT

Dude streams suck bandwith like a drunken ho.

Be very careful.

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