Comcast is headquartered a few miles away from where i live. We go first i guess.. btw, their new big ugly building looks like a USB port.
I believe streaming is less bandwidth intensive. I haven't used streamed chart in several years. Video is the worst by far. A trading friend told me his wife was watching movies over the net from her home country. One day his DOM was acting funny. Called ISP and they throttled him due to her "abuse" of their service. He starts screaming at her while we are on skype, I was crying laughing.
Back of the envelope calculations: One tick level data packet can't be more than 50 bytes (10 bytes for unique instrument ID, 10 bytes for price, 10 for quantity, 10 for timestamp, 5 for venue, and 5 for checksum). So if you were getting 10 updates per second on a very active insrument, every second for an hour, that's 50 x 10 x 3600 = 1,800,000 bytes or 1.8 MB / hr / instrument. Let's say that you are a really hardcore trader, watching the 100 most heavily traded instruments wordwide, simultaneously, for 15 hours a day, 25 days a month. That's 1.8 x 100 x 15 x 25 = 67,500 MB. Or 67 GB per month. It's streaming the HD pr0n movies that's going to bump you over 250GB / month.