Cost of watching YouTube videos on mobile phone in Nigeria

How much does it really cost to watch a Youtube movie on your mobile phone in Nigeria? This is what a lot of people who stream internet videos on their mobile phone would like to know.

Youtube videos normally stream to one's computer or mobile phone in bits and starts laying before the entire file has been downloaded. As with most mobile phone services, streaming videos on a mobile phone does come with some data costs which may be on a time or data basis.

For the purpose of this analysis, we are going to focus on data based mobile internet plans and not the time based ones since the latter comes at a flat price regardless of the data consumed or downloaded.

When it comes to data based mobile internet service, the average cost is set at about N0.05 per kb and being a YouTube fan myself, I've noticed that a 3 minute YouTue video uses around 1MB of data and this implies that 1 minute of a YouTube video would use up to about 1/3MB, 0.33MB or 330KB.

This then means that based on the average rate of 5k per KB data of video, a 3 minute video which uses around 1MB of data would cost N50 to the data subscriber.

So, given the following;
Internet Data Rate: 5k per KB
1 minute video = 330KB
Cost of video per minute = N16.5

It therefore means that:
10 minutes of YouTube video ~> N165
30 minutes of YouTube video ~> N495
60 minutes of YouTube video ~> N990

A lot of Nigerians watch Nigerian movies online by streaming it from YouTube. If you are one of those who do so, then you should know that it may cost you up to N1000 just to watch a 1 hr movie if you are using a data based internet plan and you could save a lot of money by simply subscribing to a time based plan.

A time based internet service allows you to watch a lot of videos from Youtube and use a lot of data without having to pay per byte but rather pay for the time you've used which is mostly a flat fee.