With the whole world locked down inside their homes for the past two years, video streaming services have seen a boom in their growth like never before. More people are engaged with their phones to watch video content not only for entertainment purposes but also because they have to attend meetings and watch lectures. A whole industry has evolved behind this habit of binging video content that keeps out pumping episodes and movies every week. Does this rapid growth in the streaming industry and the resultant surge caused in the energy consumption match with the growth in the sustainable energy sources? Is the whole system of ever awake data storage centers and networks, high speed cellular connectivity and the ability to reliably stream literally anything anytime, energy intense enough to move the needle on carbon emissions?
Although there are multiple organizations, government funded programmes and research initiatives that measure energy consumption and carbon emissions on a global or national scale. Entities aimed at specifically measuring the effects of video streaming on electricity consumption and carbon emissions are scarce, but there have been multiple efforts by institutions to estimate the effects of video streaming culture on the environment.
With the growth in fast data transmission systems and deeper penetration of cellular services in developing nations, the bandwidth of communication is so wide that the size of data to be streamed is becoming less of a concern and people just prefer higher quality videos if their network is good enough for it. Another aspect is the growing number of screens and their growing size, quality and resolution– all of them mark and increase on the energy consumption scale. Gary Cook of Greenpeace, which monitors the IT sector's energy footprint says “Digital videos come in very large file sizes and are getting bigger with each new generation of higher definition video. more data equals more energy needed to maintain a system that is ready to stream this video to your device at a moment's notice.”
According to IEA electricity use by data centers is around 200-250 TWh(Terawatt Hour), which corresponds to 1% of the global energy consumption, and over the last decade the number of internet users has grown at a rate of 30% per year according to Cisco. The better the connection and transmission networks are getting the faster the demand for data and therefore data centers is growing. According to IEA for every bit of data that travels the network from data centers to end users, another five bits of data are transmitted within and among data centers. On the other hand the rapid growth in demand of data centers is mostly offset by the improvement in the efficiency of data storage systems, network switches and the ability of virtualization which enables data centers to operate with fewer servers and deliver better performance.
Another side of the picture is the increasing commitment of network service providers to sustainable sources of energy and the rise in efficiency of operating data centers,Sprint reduced its energy consumption by 80% between 2014 and 2019. Vodafone’s energy use in the European region comprised 33% of renewable energy in 2020 and by July 2021, the company aimed to switch entirely to renewable sources, way ahead of its predetermined target of 2025. And more generally 4G networks are roughly five times more energy-efficient than 3G and 50 times more efficient than 2G.
According to Vox, Netflix says 70 percent of its streams end up on connected TVs instead of phones, tablets or PCs. Although data transmission accounts for much more power consumed than by the device’s screen, when we compare the energy consumption of TV with a smartphone it's about 100 times more because smartphones are designed to be much more power efficient.
According to the Shift Project, in the year 2018, online video streaming produced emissions equivalent to Spain and that amount was projected to double in the next six years. The project in its study also erroneously estimated the emission for 30 minutes of video streaming to be 3.2 Kgs ( roughly equivalent to driving 4 miles in a car) which was widely published in different popular media outlets like New York Post, BigThink and Gizmodo, later upon objection from multiple sources it was corrected.Turned out that it had reported an eight fold excess in emissions because it had confused ‘bits per second’ for ‘bytes per second’ (1 byte is comprised of eight bits), it’s new estimate was 0.4 kg for 30 minutes which was close to the estimate of another peer reviewed study published in 2014.
There are so many factors that needs to be considered in order to correctly analyze how much energy is consumed for streaming a video, like the status of your network, the kind of your screen, the type of content, the resolution of your content, the type of data center that the content is stored in; all this makes it very hard to precisely tell how much energy is consumed while streaming a video. But one thing is sure, that it is better to not let your TV stay on in the background as you sleep, cook or scroll through your phone just because it doesn't have any immediate environmental repercussions around you, doesn't mean it isn't affecting the environment at all.
Vivek is a writer who writes to explore. His interests include philosopy, psychology, poetry, cinema, mythology and international relations. Above all he’s interested in making sense of complex systems-how they work and influence each other. An alumnus of Calcutta University, he has a bachelor's degree in Physics.
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Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master, it was rightly said. Electronic devices have grown into an inevitable part of our daily lives.
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