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Comment by nicce | Hacker News Reader

Maybe. 5G still uses more power than 4G over long duration, if both are enough for streaming. 5G power usage benefits come when you download something, and it simply takes less time.

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Can’t you achieve the same results then by pretending that one long stream is just a bunch of independent chunks and download them separately in bursts? No need to trickle it the entire time.

Afaik that's how video streaming works. You can text it in YouTube and look at buffer length for example.

Edit: my objection is incorrect. We’re in fact saying the same thing. I misread a previous post :/

Not if the broadcast is (eg) HLS[0], so I think the proper answer is: “it depends.”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming?wprov=sfti...

I am surprised to see someone saying HLS wouldn't work this way. I'm not up to speed on the latest in HLS, but when I used it circa ten years ago, HLS worked by providing parts of a stream as individual video files, so I'd expect this is more true for HLS than a single-file-as-a-stream, not less. Videos were divided into fixed-length files, e.g. 10 seconds each. The playlist file saying what video files to use could list all of the file names up front for every provided quality level.

Indeed you’re right (and this was my understanding too) - I misread what a previous commenter was intending. I thought they were saying most broadcasts are 1-piece blobs, thus good for 5G bursting. My experience w HLS is indeed some small-number-of-seconds frames at a time. I guess I’m not sure here whether 5G is more battery-efficient or not. “Fast-enough” is all that’s required, so I guess it’s just the calculus of energy/bytes and how long the radio can sleep between segments. Seems very circumstantial to me…

If you're watching a live stream, there won't be all that many seconds you can buffer.

Maybe that means it spends less time buffering so smaller total power footprint?

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