Let me set the scene for you. It was a Friday night and I decided to reactivate my Netflix account. I got my favourite snacks and prepared for a night of binge-watching. After 2 hours of Netflix binging, I was suddenly disconnected.

I went from enjoying my favourite show to absolute anger. I was furious. So, I logged into ClientZone to check the data usage and, as I suspected, all my data had been used up.

But what could have happened? To find the culprit I used Glasswire, a bandwidth monitoring program, and discovered that most of my data was consumed by Netflix.

I quickly topped up my data from the Afrihost App, got back online and went to Netflix to check the display settings. It turns out that my profile was set to UHD – which consumes about 7GB per hour!

Netflix offers different display options which can help you save on data costs. You can adjust the video quality settings by going to ‘Account’ > ‘My Profile’ > ‘Playback Settings’.

Other streaming services like Showmax, YouTube and Amazon Prime also have playback settings which can help manage the video quality to optimise data usage. And because most of us are concerned about bandwidth limits and data caps, it’s good to know how much data your connection is using.

According to the official Netflix support page, data usage breaks down as follows.

And if you are using your mobile data on your smartphone, remember to switch to ‘Save Data’ mode which will allow you to watch about 6 hours per GB of data. This option can be accessed in ‘App Settings’ > ‘Cellular Data Usage’.

To learn more about how you can control how much data Netflix uses, read this useful Netflix Help Centre article: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

Happy watching!