Skip to main content

The ecologic of streaming

...ish
It might seem obvious that streaming a video is more environmentally friendly than going to get a DVD and watching it, but one of the rules of ecologic is that in the environment, common sense doesn't always deliver the right results. Think, for instance, of tomatoes, where British tomatoes raised in greenhouses have a worse carbon dioxide footprint than Spanish tomatoes, despite all those extra food miles.

It would have been entirely possible that the heavy energy use at the data centre, plus the transmission costs balanced out the production, shipping and driving back and forth that is the life of a rental DVD - but no. Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime really do have an environmental benefit (for the reasons above, and also because DVD players take a lot more energy than a streaming box like an Apple TV or a Smart TV with built-in streaming services) - and there's a study to prove it. 

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Northwestern University have come up with impressive savings that suggest  if all DVD viewing in the US in 2011 was shifted to streaming services, around 2 million tonnes of CO2 emissions could have been avoided and around 30 petajoules of energy saved—the equivalent of the amount of electricity needed to meet the demands of 200,000 US households. Not trivial.

It seems the impact of online rental/purchase of DVDs had a similar impact to streaming, but renting or buying DVDs from a physical store is much more energy intensive because of the impact of the drive. Clearly this would also be true in the UK, but my suspicion is that the impact here would be less, as car journeys in the UK tend to be shorter, and cars tend to be more environmentally friendly than those in the US. And 2011 was a long time ago in the video watching world - I suspect significantly fewer of us now drive to get a DVD (bye-bye Blockbuster).

As streaming increases, the report's authors suggest that effort should be put into improving the efficiency of end user devices and network transmission energy to bring down the energy use even further.

Even so, those of us who have largely moved from DVDs or Blurays to streaming can feel suitably smug.

If you are the kind of person who likes to dig into the actual paper, you can find it by clicking this link.

Fast Facts courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood Institute of Physics:
  • An estimated 1.2 billion DVDs were purchased in the US in 2011 
  • An estimated 17.2 billion hours of DVDs were viewed in 2011 in the US 
  • An estimated 3.2 billion hours of movies and television programmes were streamed in the US in 2011 
  • The percentages of total video streaming viewing time attributable to computers, televisions, and mobile devices in 2011 are estimated at 20%, 77%, and 3%, respectively 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope