Am I downloading when I watch movie online?

MGLman

Am I downloading anything when I watching move online?

Recently Eircom charged me for excess use of broadband but I did not download anything but only watched movies online. Is it one kind of downloading?

Thanks a lot for your help in advance.

Patriciamc93

Short answer: Yes!

You are still downloading the content to watch it e.g a youtube video of 4 mins is about 4mb or something like that so a programme is much much more!

Stiltzkin

yes you are downloading!I swear it happened to me too.You may aswell actually download the film itself and save it as a file on you're pc instead of just watching it online.That way you can watch it over and over again without having to download it off the site everytime.

jd83

yh your downloading them to a temp folder. When you restart your pc or clear browsing history they get deleted. Bit streaming an episode of a show is the exact same a downloadind to the hd in terms of bandwith used

maggy_thatcher

MGLman wrote: »

Am I downloading anything when I watching move online?

Recently Eircom charged me for excess use of broadband but I did not download anything but only watched movies online. Is it one kind of downloading?

Thanks a lot for your help in advance.

Yes. "Downloading" is copying content from a remote location to your location. In order to watch movies on-line, you are copying the content from wherever the movie is stored to your desktop so that you can watch them. It doesn't matter if you don't keep the contents afterwards. When done in real-time, it's usually called "streaming". Even visiting a website is a form of downloading, they're usually just much smaller objects.

If you're continuously watching high-definition movies online, that would definitely make your ISP notice and charge you accordingly. If you plan to do this a lot, I'd recommend going to a higher rate plan with a higher download cap.

aidan_walsh

Any data coming to your computer from any other computer on the internet is downloading.