How much broadband does live streamed sport take?

usignuolo

We have a 10mbs L Virgin Media cable broadband line. We are due to be upgraded in July sometime. My OH was streaming live baseball today from 7pm and 8.30pm, when service was throttled back to 2mbs. Which it will stay now for 5 hours. As I understand it we have a 1.5gbs allowance in peak period (4-9pm). It seems therefore live sport streaming soaks up 1gb an hour. Does this sound about right? We have not had anything else on during that time, not even tv.

It did happen once before and I phoned up Virgin to ask why but they only said we must have exceeded our allowance. How much does a service like Netflicks take, it that 1gb an hour? Only I have been thinking of getting it but there seems no point if it is, not until our line speed increases.

esuhl

If I remember rightly, a high-definition video stream would use roughly around 600MB to 1.2GB per hour, so your 1GB/hr figure seems about right. It all depends on the audio/video quality, of course.

EDIT:
Actually, I've just found this official BBC blog, which says that to stream their iPlayer content in HD, you'd need a connection speed of at least 3.2Mb/s, and the stream would use around 1.5GB/hr.

EDIT2:
And this news story shows that you can stream Netflix' content in three quality levels: low (~300MB/hr), medium (~700MB/hr) and high (~1GB/hr).