With the arrival of our wee baby, so too has arrived a big increase in our TV watching. When you're at home all day with a baby who prefers human contact all the time, there's only so many forms of entertainment to turn to. Since we're modern cord-cut millenials, all our video watchings get streamed over the internet. And with this uptick in watching, that's meant we've come very close to hitting our monthly bandwidth caps. But, I've been finding little ways to curb that in an epic battle against the number of bits coming in and out.

To get an idea of where all the bandwidth was being pissed away, I turned to the daily reports that my eero router provides. It breaks down bandwidth usage grouped by device type (computers, streaming devices, phones, etc) and then further by device. This tells me exactly where I should be looking for reductions. By far the biggest bandwidth suck was on the main TV, so that's where a lot of my effort has been focused.

Step one was to stop watching so much streamed video. However, you've still gotta watch video. I've got a pretty good library of shows and movies, so I did a deep dive into disc ripping, and started repopulating my Plex library with stuff off the shelf. Honestly, this has been on my bucket list for a while, so that was really just a win-win (disc ripping has made a lot of strides in the last several years). Though, it does confine me to things I've already purchased. That really put a damper on my desire to watch Star Trek: Lower Decks... until I just bought the Blu-rays off of eBay and ripped it into the library. Probably more expensive than overage fees, but now they're mine and I got the best quality possible (a statement I will negate in the next paragraph).

Another genius idea I had was to simply dial down the resolution of the Apple TV. Streaming apps will only stream whatever resolution makes snse for your TV, so if the Apple TV is reduced to a 1080p signal, that's what it'll get. This has resulted in bigger bandwidth savings than streaming from the Plex server and, honestly, I can't really tell the degredation in quality from how far away the couch is from the TV.

Finally, scouring the list of devices using data when the device itself wasn't being used, I simply started turning things off. The TV computer is used rarely. OFF. The crib monitor isn't being used while we're not using the crib. OFF.

Over the last couple of weeks, it's been a marked reduction in bandwidth usage. Going by the week's end report, ~20% reduction week-over-week for two weeks straight. That's progress! To the reader, this is nothing super interesting, but it's been an interesting back-burner brain teaser. Of course, there's one thing that could once again throw off the balance of bandwidth usage...

Uploading videos to an electronics YouTube channel...