So, I joined the 21st century and now have a data plan. I have no idea how many bytes anything takes. So, if, for instance I stream an episode of This American Life, how many Mb. will it use up? How about an episode of Glee? I assume that just like downloading a file on the computer, if the connection is not great it may take longer, but the amount of data is defined.
An episode of This American Life is about 30MB. I don’t know for sure, but I would guess an episode of Glee to be somewhere between 180-1200MB, depending on the resolution and compression method. Streaming This American Life isn’t going to be that big of a deal anywhere you have a reasonable data connection. You only have to download .5MB/min, at 30MB for a 60 minute show. Even at my smallest file size estimate, streaming glee is 4.5MB/min.
You should also research podcast applications for your phone which will allow you to download and locally cache things such as This American Life, so you can perform the download where you have WiFi, and then listen later without using additional data. This is how I survive on a 200MB data plan.
I strongly recommend that you take advantage of the tools your phone and carrier provide to monitor your data usage, so that you don’t run into expensive data overage charges.