Cable TV, Cellphones, High-speed Internet service. We normally have it all – and the bills that go with our growing bundle of technology. This blog entry will attempt to help curve some of your spending on entertainment while having the freedom to watch all your favorite shows.
More viewers are moving away from traditional TV and cable set-top boxes towards internet-connected devices like laptops, smartphones and tablets. Viewers have a wide array of entertainment choices when it comes to online streaming media. Amazon Prime Instant video, Hulu, Netflix (which became available in Botswana last year) are the largest content providers.
With so many outlets to choose from, and with so many internet-enabled devices at our finger tips, the amount of data generated by a typical household is huge. We consume so much content at accelerated speeds with so much selections offering uncountable hours of addictive programming.
An annual internet study by Cisco as part of the company’s Visual Networking Index initiative, estimate the average household will generate about 49GB per month of internet traffic in 2016. However, as a result of traffic growth and service penetration driven by an increase in various new devices and connections available to the internet user, this has had a multiplier effect on the estimated traffic expected last years.
In light of this, researchers had to make the distinction between a linear TV household and a household that has ‘cut the cord’. A Cord cutting household rely on internet video streaming and are expected to generate 102 GB per month in 2016, compared to 49 GB per month for an average household.
This difference occurs because linear television generates much less traffic (one stream of video shared across numerous linear-TV households) than Internet video, which is unicast to each Internet video device.
Internet-enabled devices such as directly connected HD televisions, set-top boxes and gaming consoles with access to the internet, represent a rising trend which shows increasingly reliance on internet video and the whole ecosystem of services provides.
Netflix is one of the largest streaming provider of internet video, largely movies and tv series. They have recently urged ISPs to remove home internet data caps as it deems them ‘unreasonable’.
Luckily, BTCL doesn’t impose data caps on their home plans. Customer can take advantage of this and stream content to their living rooms, bedrooms or fridges as much as they want.
A customer can opt-in for a long-contract plan which reduces the monthly internet costs.
