Showmax beats Netflix and Disney+ in mobile data consumption

MultiChoice’s Showmax has the best mobile data-saving setting of the four major subscription-based video streaming services in South Africa, according to tests performed by MyBroadband.

In South Africa, Showmax, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Netflix offer mobile-only entry-level subscriptions restricted to smartphones and tablets.

This approach makes a lot of sense when considering the typical South Africans’ affordability profile and the fact that most people in the country access the Internet through a smartphone.

However, downloading the video and audio files needed to stream movies and TV shows from the Internet can consume a lot of data.

Many South African households lack access to an affordable uncapped Internet plan and rely on mobile data to access online apps and services.

While South Africa’s mobile data prices have come down significantly in recent years, they are still expensive compared to real average household incomes.

On its own, a lower subscription price will not be sufficient to appeal to less affluent subscribers at scale.

As a South African-born and Africa-focused streaming service, Showmax is keenly aware of these limits and has worked hard to optimise its app’s data consumption.

In fact, the company has prioritised lower-quality streaming optimisation over 4K streaming, the maximum resolution available on all its competitors’ platforms.

Showmax and its parent argue that demand for 4K is limited across Africa and other emerging markets due to infrastructure challenges.

“This makes significant investment [in 4K] premature at this stage,” MultiChoice has told MyBroadband.

While data-saving modes lower the quality of a stream, content can still be very watchable, even at lower resolutions.

This is especially true if the main appeal of a show is its story and writing rather than its visual aspects.

For example, in sitcoms and reality TV, the most important factor is that viewers can hear the jokes and drama unfolding.

MyBroadband compared the data consumed by the four big video streaming services in South Africa with their data-saving modes turned on.

We also considered the “perceived quality” of their streams under these settings to indicate the effectiveness of their data-saving algorithms.

According to tests performed by MyBroadband at the end of October 2024, Showmax consumes about 3.24MB of data per minute or 194.55MB per hour on its Data Saver setting.

That is the lowest consumption rate of the four major subscription streaming services.

Amazon Prime Video had just slightly higher consumption at 197.71MB per hour, a moderate improvement over the 217.55MB it consumed during our previous tests.

Netflix had the third lowest streaming consumption but was best in perceived quality.

Disney+ consumed nearly three times as much data as the top three best data-saving services.

The app’s data saver would only allow for reducing resolution to 480p, significantly higher than the 144p supported by Showmax and Netflix.

Nevertheless, its perceived quality on a mobile device was similar to Netflix, which consumed far less data.

MyBroadband also analysed the consumption rate of one of the world’s oldest streaming services — YouTube.

As was the case in our previous comparison, it recorded substantially lower data consumption at just 83.84MB per hour.

However, the caveat is that YouTube’s lowest-quality setting produces very poor picture quality that makes discerning faces and certain objects challenging.

YouTube is also geared more towards community-created content rather than professional scripted productions, although it also offers lots of entertaining and informative videos.

The table below compares the data consumption of Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix, Showmax, and YouTube in their data saver modes.