Saving Mobile Data: 480p, 720p or 1080p?

On a limited data pack the resolution you pick matters more than anything else you will choose. The figures below are rough — real sizes vary with the length, the codec and how the copy was made — but the ratios hold.

Roughly what an hour costs

480p

Around 300–500 MB an hour. Fine on a phone screen, and the sensible choice when data is short or the connection is slow.

720p

Around 700 MB–1 GB an hour. The usual balance for a phone or a laptop.

1080p

Around 1.5–2.5 GB an hour. Worth it on a large screen or a TV, wasteful on a small one — at arm's length on a phone, most people cannot tell it from 720p.

An HEVC (x265) copy is typically around half the size of an AVC copy at the same resolution, so 720p HEVC can cost less data than 480p AVC. Check your device plays it first — see HEVC vs AVC.

Series multiply, films do not

This is where data packs disappear. A two-hour film at 720p is a few gigabytes. A twenty-episode season at forty minutes an episode is more than thirteen hours of video — the same quality choice now costs roughly ten times as much. For a full season, drop one step in resolution and prefer HEVC; the difference on a phone is small and the saving is not.

Practical habits

• Download on Wi-Fi, watch on mobile. A downloaded file costs its data once; streaming the same thing twice costs it twice.
• Check the size before you start. The file size is shown next to each quality, and it is the honest number — not the label.
• Do not re-download what you paused. A download manager that resumes will pick up where it stopped; starting again spends the data twice.
• Match the quality to the screen. 1080p on a 6-inch phone spends data on detail your eye cannot resolve at normal viewing distance.
• Watch the episode count, not the episode size. Ten percent saved per episode is ten percent saved across the whole season.

If a download keeps failing part-way

That is usually the connection rather than the file, and a resuming download manager is the practical answer — restarting from zero on a weak connection wastes the data you have already spent. How to Download covers the rest.