Netflix vs Showmax vs Disney+ vs YouTube — Biggest data munchers

YouTube and Showmax use the least mobile data in their data-saving modes among the five major video streaming services in South Africa. However, Netflix is vastly more efficient than all its competitors in high-quality streaming.

That is according to an analysis of the data consumption of popular video streaming apps conducted by MyBroadband in April 2024.

Video streaming is among the most data-heavy online applications because video files contain a lot of data.

Several streaming providers are keenly aware of affordability constraints in South Africa and offer data-saving modes to ensure those with limited Internet plans don’t stampede through their bundles.

We compared the data consumption of Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix, Showmax, and YouTube to see which offered the most efficient data-saving and high-quality streaming modes.

Our tests were performed with the Android apps of these services running on a Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone.

Statistics were taken from the data usage monitoring page available on Android devices.

It should be noted that streaming data consumption can vary greatly depending on your device and Internet network speeds. Streaming apps will adjust bandwidth usage dynamically if they detect your connection’s bandwidth is too slow.

To ensure our figures were as accurate as possible, we used Wi-Fi and mobile connections fast enough so the device could stream video at its maximum capped bandwidth in each setting.

We also streamed entire titles to ensure that none of the data usage recorded was for video buffered ahead of time.

We then divided the data consumption by the number of seconds in each title and multiplied this by 3,600 for an average hourly consumption figure.

Oldie but a goodie

YouTube, the oldest streaming service of the bunch, consumed the least amount of data on its automatic data-saving setting, with just 80.75MB per hour.

The major downside is that this aggressively limits the resolution to 144p, resulting in a blurry image where it would sometimes be difficult to distinguish between different peoples’ faces. Medium-sized text was also illegible.

When we tried to use the automatic best-quality setting for our next test, we found YouTube’s adjustment to be quite janky.

It failed to increase our quality from 360p for a long period despite being connected to a very fast 250Mbps fibre connection over a 5GHz Wi-Fi network while being right next to the router.

This was despite ensuring that all data saving settings were turned off.

We manually adjusted the resolution to 2160p for our high-quality consumption testing on YouTube.

Here, YouTube consumed the most data.

The video never paused to buffer, and content was loaded well ahead of playback, showing that the automatic quality adjustment could not correctly assess the available bandwidth.

To be fair, it is likely that the maximum resolution of the rival services was full HD (1080p), while YouTube’s was 4K (2160p).

Therefore, consuming around double the amount of data of its rivals is actually highly efficient, as 4K has four times the pixel count of Full HD.

YouTube also had the widest range of quality options — eight manual settings from 144p to 2160p and three other settings where YouTube adjusts quality automatically.

Showmax consumed the second-lowest amount of data on its data-saving setting, working out to around 120.48MB per hour.

However, this was a far cry from its claimed data-saving consumption rate of 40MB per hour in this setting.

It also consumed 1GB more in an hour than its claimed consumption on its highest quality setting.

We repeatedly tested this over both Wi-Fi and mobile data connectivity to ensure accuracy.

The same goes for Amazon Prime Video, which consumed over 217MB per hour in data saving mode, substantially more than its claimed rate of 140MB per hour at this streaming quality.

Netflix brings balance — and Disney+ flounders

Netflix’s 192MB hourly consumption in data-saving mode meant it fell right in the middle of the pack.

However, its maximum quality consumption was substantially lower than all its rivals while still providing what appeared to be either an HD or full HD image.

Subjectively speaking, we found Netflix’s balance of quality and consumption to be the best for those who could be bothered to configure settings manually.

This might be attributed to its adoption of the more efficient AV1 codec and its advanced streaming algorithms.

Disney+ had the highest data consumption in its data-saving mode and the second-highest usage at maximum quality.

It was also the only app with playback issues, including initially stuttering in data-saving mode.

When excluding YouTube’s 4K performance and only looking at full HD streams, Disney+ fared worst in both categories.

To its credit, Disney+’s consumption figures were on par with its claims.

The table below summarises the hourly data consumption of the video streaming apps we tested. Where available, claimed consumptions were included in brackets.