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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

are you representative of most people?

I certainly wouldn't say I am.

Considering actual adoption numbers I think I might be representing of most people in this. How many people do you know that actually watch Netflix on their phone?

I watch TV/movies almost exclusively on the phone. Not because it’s the best experience, but simply because it’s the only device that is on my person at all times. So it has been years since I thought in terms of going to a screen to watch something.

Which is still quite rare when you look at peoples cellphone network usage.

In 2020 the average cellphone user in North America only consumed 11.8 GB per month and the median is much lower. That really isn’t enough to be regularly be watching videos.

Netflix allows you to download and cache videos for later viewing, and some carriers don't count streaming videos on certain platforms against their users' data usage.

But people can watch videos over Wi-Fi on their phones, not just over cellular data.

Not rare at all if you sit on a train and glance around you. I see people watching movies/TV on phones and tablets constantly out in public. Very common.

It's partly the reason I got a Fold 3. Very good for on the move media consumption.

As for data use, aside from the points already brought up - ability to download for later from Netflix, certain services not counting towards data usage on some plans, etc - Netflix and other streaming services will also know you are on a mobile network and provide a more compressed stream at a lower resolution (720p with lower encoding settings being common) to reduce data usage and buffering.

People on a train aren’t a representative sample, nor is every video on a cellphone Netflix. Tablets are of course another story people regularly watch movies on those because the screen isn’t tiny.

Which gets back to the basic point people don’t watch a lot of video on cellphones and Netflix is usage is even lower.

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