How Much Data Does Watching Twitch Use?

Whether you are connected to your home WiFi or using your mobile data, have you ever wondered how much data does watching Twitch use?

It may be just out of your curiosity, or it could be as critical as making sure you don’t run out for other activities you need your data for.

The amount of data you use, whenever you are watching Twitch, depends on the resolution of your video, your interaction with it, as well as the device you are using.

In this guide, you will not only learn how much data you are actually consuming, but we will also teach you the best tips to allow your device to consume less data!

What Are the Factors Involved in Your Bitrate?

How much data does watching Twitch streaming use? – This question is often thrown and asked by hundreds, if not thousands of people who are into gaming.

Your bitrate is the most efficient way of measuring the transfer of bits from one location to another. 

So, the faster the transfer of data is (more bitrate), the more data gets consumed.

In this sense, the amount of data you will use, or your bitrate will depend on a few factors. Let’s try to look at some of the most significant factors that can affect your bitrate.

Quality of Your Video or Resolution

When it comes to the bitrate, one of the most influential factors is the quality or the resolution of what you are accessing.

In a simpler and more sensible manner, the better the quality of the video, of course, the larger data consumption would be.

What Your Interactions Are?

Are you interacting with other people in the comments section? Are you scrolling past through the comments?

Remember, not all comments are displayed on one single page. In order for you to see more comments, you need to let it load for all the texts to appear.

Therefore, if you are loading older comments, you are using more data – which results in larger data consumption.

What Device You are Using

Let’s say you’ve had a ton of experiences watching Twitch on your smartphone, everything went smoothly.

Then, when you switched to a laptop, you noticed that after a few minutes, you already got an alert telling you that you have been consuming too much data – why is this so?

Since laptops and computers have larger screens, they would have to render the display more than what a smartphone needs, hence, they consume more data.

But overall, how much data do you consume when you watch or stream on Twitch?

How Much Data Does Watching Twitch Use – Facts?

Based on the factors and the information we gave above; you should have an idea about how much data you will need to successfully be able to watch and stream on Twitch.

However, if you want more detailed information about it, here’s a quick and easy table you can use as a reference.

Watching Experience	Resolution	Bitrate (kb/s)	Data Consumed	Time to Consume 1GB (min)
Low Quality	240p to 320p	500 to 600 kb/s	300 MB (0.3GB per hour)	3 hours and 20
Average Quality	480p	900 to 1200 kb/s	700 MB (0.7 GB per hour)	1 hour and 25 minutes
High Quality	720p	1800 to 2500 kb/s	900 MB (0.9 GB per hour)	1 hour and 6 minutes
High-Definition	1080p	3000 to 35000 kb/s	1.5 GB per hour	40 minutes
Detailed, High-Definition	2K	16 mb/s to 24 mb/s	3GB per hour	20 minutes
Sharper, Better HD	4K	35 to 45 mb/s to 68 mb/s	7.2 GB per hour	6 minutes

These are some of the most accurate data pertaining to your data usage and consumption while streaming Twitch.

Are These Figures 100% Exact?

As much as we want to say that they are, they would not be 100% exact.

These are only rough figures and approximations about the data consumption while watching and/or streaming Twitch. As you can see, there are ranges, therefore, they are not exact.

What this basically means is that the amount consumed can fall right on a specific value or in between the values given.

You can base your ideas on it because most likely, they will fall right within the range.

Read Next: How long does Twitch take to approve Emotes?

How Do You Save Data Watching Twitch?

We all have our gamers in us, yes. However, we should have some type of control over our spending. You can watch and stream Twitch all day, but that must not be the reason why you will go broke.

In fact, here are a couple of tips to help you save data while watching or streaming on Twitch.

1. Use a Data Cap

While it’s technically not a “Data-Saving” feature, it can guard and protect you from paying highly excessive interest fees when you’re watching or accessing Twitch.

You can set a data cap through your mobile phone service provider or through your phone. Whichever works best for you would be good!

Some options will allow you to toggle through the different alerts and notifications you can get. Use it to your advantage to have a close watch on where your usage is!

2. Adjust Video Quality/Resolution Settings

Quite possibly the most effective way to lower the data consumption of your activity is by lowering the resolution of your video.

You can do and toggle this by following these simple steps:

1.    Click on the video you want to watch.

2.    Check the bottom-right part of the video and hit on Settings or the button with the gear icon.

3.    Find the button that says Quality.

4.    Once you are there, you will see different quality options available for the stream.

5.    Switch to a lower quality.

Change it up to a quality that’s tolerable for you to watch without actually sacrificing your experience!

3. Switch to WiFi Instead  

Of course, probably the wisest and the most sensible thing to do is to switch to a public WiFi network instead.

There are thousands of public WiFi hotspots you can use; so, you can use them to avoid eating up your data.

Note:

If you have a VPN service, it’s going to be better and safer to access it while being connected to VPN.

Conclusion

Whether you are an avid gamer, or you are a solid fan of a particular streamer, knowing all of these things will be relevant, especially to your data consumption.

Hopefully, we were able to answer your question of how much data does watching Twitch use in the easiest and the simplest ways we can!