Download or Stream?

There is no shortage of content on the web in this day and age; from written content and video, to music, movies, TV shows and various other forms of entertainment. There’s also a number of ways you can retrieve this content, whether you’re storing it on your physical device, keeping things in cloud storage or taking advantage of unlimited streaming subscriptions so you can just watch things whenever you have an Internet connection. Because there’s such a variety of methods available for enjoying entertainment on the Internet, it does beg the question of whether you should download your content, or settle for streaming it – and that’s what we’re talking about today.

Downloading vs Streaming Content

There is a difference between downloading and streaming, of course. Downloading is the act of taking a file and making a copy of it on to your device through the act of downloading it. Once you’ve got your file downloaded, you can access it whenever you want, without the need of an Internet connection. Streaming is different; the data is streamed to your device from the Internet, but isn’t saved. Because of this, you can only stream data when you’re connected to the Internet. From this description, it kind of seems like downloading has the most benefits, but that isn’t necessarily the case.

Downloading allows you to store things on your own device, or your cloud storage if you’d prefer. However, some downloads can be very expensive and you do need to take into consideration that you’ll need to find the storage space – whether that’s physical or in the cloud – for the files you’re downloading. In addition to this, although you can come across free downloads that are legal – such as those that are now in the public domain, or special offers that companies/creators are running – the number of these isn’t exactly high, and downloading can end up costing you a lot of money. Although many people choose to download from illegal torrents and file sharing websites, this isn’t something we recommend as it can land you in a lot of trouble for copyright infringement and even theft. For financial and economic reasons, streaming might be a better idea.

Many streaming services such as Netflix, Spotify and Amazon offer unlimited usage policies, and since the vast majority of home Internet service providers also offer reasonably priced unlimited Internet packages, it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of this. Additionally, services such as Spotify, Amazon Prime and Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited give you the opportunity to actually download your content (that you would otherwise be streaming) to your device that you can then access without an Internet connection – although you still need to keep up with your subscription otherwise access will be rescinded.

From this, you can see that a combination of downloading the files you’re likely to want to access when out and about, or when you don’t have an Internet connection (such as your music, favourite TV shows and entertainment for travelling), and streaming when you’re at home or have a stable Internet connection is probably the best course of action. Everything has its place!

Offcloud, your cloud-based download manager

Whether you’re storing your downloads in your cloud storage, or fetching streaming content to refer back to later on, we here at Offcloud can give you a hand. Here at Offcloud, we offer a secure and private cloud storage function, instant downloads direct from BitTorrent and the ability to fetch, convert and store any cloud data from the web to take a look at later on. We give you 10GB of storage space and 100 direct links to get you started with a free account, so you can see what we’re about before making any long-term commitment! You can find out a bit more about Offcloud in our previous post here (link).