Estimate data for podcast downloads.
Podcast episodes are long but very light: at 128 kbps a 48-minute episode is about 44 MB, so a full week of daily listening fits inside a third of a gigabyte. Most spoken-word shows are encoded at 64-128 kbps mono, where speech is perfectly clear, and only music-heavy productions justify higher rates. The episodes-per-gigabyte figure shows just how much listening a small allowance supports.
Podcast episode size
MB per episode = kbps x minutes x 60 / (8 x 1024); weekly MB = MB per episode x episodes; episodes per GB = 1024 / MB per episode
Most speech shows are 64-128 kbps, often mono, which halves the data again. Music and highly produced narrative podcasts sometimes run 192-256 kbps stereo, roughly doubling episode size.
Download, over wifi. Downloading transfers each episode once at a known size, whereas streaming re-downloads on every listen and can be interrupted and restarted. Auto-download restricted to wifi is the ideal setting.
Because auto-download fetches every new episode of every subscription. Trimming subscriptions or setting auto-download to the most recent one or two episodes usually cuts podcast data by more than half.