What to do if wget's progress:mega doen't cut it anymore?

I went down a big long path of playing with modifying the wget output on the fly because I couldn't figure this out either. Then I found this debian bugreport which led me to the -e dotbytes=X option in wget. I tested this and it works with my wget-1.12:

wget blah --progress=dot -e dotbytes=10M

prints a dot for every 10M of output. You can use 1000M or whatever you like.

I know this is a bit out of date, but just for completeness there is also a dot:giga style with wget-1.12

wget blah --progress=dot:giga

From the man page:

If "mega" is not enough then you can use the "giga" style---each dot represents 1M retrieved, there are eight dots in a cluster, and 32 dots on each line (so each line contains 32M).

This is not as flexible as the -e, --execute option, but it is a pre-packaged alternative