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Louie0722 Author

Level 1

5 points

With new iOS 7, video streaming takes up phone's capacity

I noticed that with the new iOS, your videos (movies, television shows, music videos) are readily available to stream in the Videos app. But whenever you stream the video, it actually takes up storage in your iPhone. Everytime a video is being watched, your available storage capacity in your phone keeps on getting decreased quite significantly. And there's no way to delete the storage it's taking up, I think whenever a video is being streamed, the streaming file is being kept under the "Others" category because when you plug your phone ito iTunes, the "Others" section shows a huge amount of storage being taken up. Has anybody seen the same thing? And if so, is there a fix to this problem? Because my storage capacity is diminishing everytime I stream a video and the whole point of streaming a video is to NOT have it take up space in my phone's hard drive memory but unfortunately, it is taking up space in my phone's memory. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated or maybe Apple is coming up with a solution hopefully.

iPhone 5, iOS 7.0.2

Posted on Nov 1, 2013 9:30 PM

79 replies

Jun 25, 2014 12:55 PM in response to Bjorn Tennoe

Some more context from me. Below is my iPad's storage as reported by itself (also see screen shot at the end).

Model: iPad Air / 16 GB / iOS 7.1.1.
12.8 GB of RAM reserved for apps & data.
0 bytes is available.
Adding together all the apps' use, the total is 3.6 GB – only 28 % of the original 12.8 GB.
So there's 9.2 GB missing – a whopping 72 % of the storage available for use.

Using rlmonera's tip («Reopen the video, skip to the end of the video and let it play all the way out») on a number of purchases, I reclaimed ~4 GB. However, I have purchased quite a lot of iTunes content, and it will be extremely time consuming to repeat for all iTunes items across all devices. Especially when iOS doesn't provide any clues as to which items have cache files associated with them.

Overall, my impression is that iTunes creates tons of garbage that is extremely well hidden and nearly impossible to remove, save for full factory resets.

And I assume Apple doesn't want us to do full factory resets on all devices on a regular basis just because we are loyal iTunes customers?

Jun 27, 2014 11:42 AM in response to iKnock

Taking iKnock's advice, I too installed iBrowse.

7.7 GB, well over half of the available storage, reclaimed.

Thanks iBrowse and iKnock!

iTunes team, sure hope this is fixed in iOS 8.

jfaughnan

Level 3

886 points

Jun 28, 2014 5:58 PM in response to Bjorn Tennoe

I'd been unsuccessful with PhoneView deletion of CloudAsset files, but this time when I tried iBrowse I was careful to do a full sync after I deleted the invisible video files. Took a long time, but after it iOS cleared the storage.

This bug was partly fixed by 7.1.1 but clearly it's still around. Thanks for your updates!

enochg

Level 1

0 points

Dec 27, 2015 3:10 PM in response to iKnock

This was a great suggestion and worked for me perfectly. The only surprise was how much space I gained back.

With new iOS 7, video streaming takes up phone's capacity