ive developed some low data use habits from using mostly mobile data for internet.
i use newsraft to download the podcasts and videos I listen to, to a VPS using their fast and nearly unlimited internet.
then i use ffmpeg to convert them on the server to 24b opus files before downloading them to my local machine.
for audio files, it generally reduces the file size to 1/3. for video files, the reduction is significantly larger.
then i push the files to an oldschool iPod so i can listen and do stuff at the same time.
works for me.