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Comment by ryanmercer | Hacker News Reader

Most major ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, Cox, Brighthouse) have a data cap in the United States, however I rarely hear of them enforcing them. They're usually 1TB with another tier for truly unlimited.

I listen to 80 something podcasts, most of which are weekly if not daily, and watch 2-3 hours of YouTube/Netflix/Hulu on Weekdays and probably 20 hours on the weekend and never come close to hitting the cap.

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I've been charged multiple times by Comcast for going over. Apple TV 4K with Netflix blows through it in about two weeks with two adults that work full time and rarely stream at most a few hours a day.

That doesn’t sound right. Two hours a day, 14 days, two adults (watching separately) is 56 hours of 4K streaming. Netflix 4K streaming is 3.5 to 7 GB per hour. So worst case for two weeks is 392GB. Now over a month, with a little extra watching on weekends, I can see how you’d blow past the cap.

Are you running any crypto seeds, torrenting, gaming, have an unsecured network, etc?

According to this article https://www.androidcentral.com/how-much-data-does-streaming-... Netflix 4k is 7.2gb an hour, if you have a 1TB Comcast cap and they're counting that as 1000gb you should be fine for at east 130 hours (giving an allowance for phone/app/os updates and random browsing).

Also, why 4k? Small room, massive display? Many people can not even detect a difference between 1080p and 4k at normal couch distance. https://www.experienceuhd.com/blog/can-human-eye-see-differe...

You can get a giant 4K TV for well under $1000. All of this moaning about not being able to tell the difference between 4K needs to die.

>You can get a giant 4K TV for well under $1000.

Not sure how that is relevant to my comment, but the 2017 nominal median income per capita was $31,786 in the United States. That means even a $650 television is more than a week's gross pay for as much as 40% of the US population.

Most of us are quite content with even 720p too and just because something is 'under $1000' doesn't mean you need to replace a perfectly functional television.

The average person spends something like 35 hours a week watching TV and the average household spent $285 per month on media last year. Not spending a large amount of your income on a nice TV is kind of insane given that.

> Also, why 4k? Small room, massive display? Many people can not even detect a difference between 1080p and 4k at normal couch distance.

I've got a 55" 4K at a viewing distance of maybe 6', tops, if you're leaning waaaaay back on the couch, and can only barely tell the difference. A good 1080p source (high bitrate h264 or h265, or a normal ol' 1080p bluray) looks a hell of a lot better than Netflix's 4k. HDR matters a ton more than 4k itself does, as far as how good something looks.

[EDIT] and what really matters is having semi-decent speakers in a somewhat-OK 5.1 layout, with a proper receiver. I'd drop to 720p on the picture before I'd give that up.

Thats been my experience as well but cheap phone plans do have very limited data some only 5 to 10gb. I've seen multiple people blow all of it in less than a week on Netflix alone.

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