The Shift Project has released a report pointing the finger at online video as a significant, and growing, cause of greenhouse gas emissions.
From New Scientist:
The transmission and viewing of online videos generates 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or nearly 1 per cent of global emissions. On-demand video services such as Netflix account for a third of this, with online pornographic videos generating another third.
[...] The authors call for measures to limit the emissions from online videos, such as preventing them from autoplaying and not transmitting videos in high definition when it is unnecessary. For instance, some devices can now display higher resolutions than people can perceive. The report says regulation will be necessary.
No word on the carbon footprints of HTTPS, JavaScript, or advertising.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Sunday July 14 2019, @08:38AM (6 children)
Probably on the order of noise relative to images relative to audio streaming relative to video streaming (relative to 3d-holographic streaming).
How does it break down between transmission vs. viewing, though? And couldn't it be amortized by downloading/caching during non-peak hours?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday July 14 2019, @08:54AM (1 child)
One would indeed thing that HTTPS; Javascripts, just generally bloating webcode of sorts and advertisements are just completely dwarfed by streaming (audio, video or both) when it comes to size. Just watching more then a minute or two probably turns the code output to an insignificant number.
One could guess that they could do more caching then they already do. After all it already happens on at least a few levels. We are not all watching youtube clips from that one server somewhere in serverfarm but it has been distributed out based on some criteria -- probably assumed views or number of views while other clips watched by very few people don't get cached at all. So with that in mind it might be somewhat dicey to talk about a carbon footprint of streaming since it will come from so many different sources and as noted will most likely already have been cached at least once to a location closer to you then the original. ISP:s could probably save a fair bandwidth to by doing it on their end, if they are just large enough and know their customer base somewhat they might know what to put in the cache or not on any given day.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @03:04PM
Compare the size of i.reddit.com with the current reddit.com to see how much bloat there is. Then multiply the difference by number of pageviews and watts used per MB bandwidth. I get 3 TWh per year of wasted (not total, just wasted on bloat) electricity for that site alone, more than used by 96 countries.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday July 14 2019, @11:11AM
There's a pie chart where it breaks down into production of equipment and use of equipment. The use part is divided into networks, data centers, and terminals. I'm assuming terminals (which is 20% of the total) would represent the power consumption of the hardware being used to watch the video. It says this figure comes from an estimate based on smart phones and laptops (not multi-100W desktops!)
HTTPS, JS, and ads aren't going to account for much bandwidth compared to the video itself, but they sure make a difference in CPU load at my end.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Sunday July 14 2019, @03:17PM
I wonder how much carbon emission is attributable to the practices of religion and the making of repressive law? Building, travel, heating, cooling, lighting, radio and television transmissions, Internet activity, enforcement, manufacturing tokens of superstition, printing and shipping of volumes and pamphlets containing fairy stories, wars and everything associated with them...
--
"You the bomb."
"No, you the bomb.
...
A compliment in the USA.
An argument in the middle east.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 14 2019, @05:19PM (1 child)
Also, how does it break down between DRM and actual rendering? That is, what percentage would you save if you didn't have DRM? All that encryption/decryption surely doesn't come for free.
Save the planet. Fight DRM! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:42AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday July 14 2019, @08:47AM (6 children)
save the planet
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday July 14 2019, @11:18AM (5 children)
Trade-off of increased decoding complexity for decreased data rate. Which is the dominant factor?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday July 14 2019, @12:32PM (4 children)
Decoding complexity goes away once hardware decode support is available in GPUs and SoCs, which is what it will need to become widespread. Thus, data rate is the dominant factor.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday July 14 2019, @08:42PM (3 children)
But all the hardware that didn't support it goes to the landfill and needs to be replaced.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday July 14 2019, @09:17PM (2 children)
That hardware can be reused to control sprinkler systems and low-grade sex robots.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday July 14 2019, @10:15PM
And buying legacy hardware rather than the hot new thing to Jew Qualcomm and others out of new revenue as revenge for them hiring H1-B stinkies rather than real Americans.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday July 14 2019, @11:51PM
And this carbon-sequestering device! [indiegogo.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @08:50AM (2 children)
or transnational "think tanks"?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @09:09AM
so you mean the internet in general, the ultimate "transnational" thing we have?
You want to reduce CO2 emissions, add a large carbon tax on all carbon so it makes more and more sense to generate electricity in other ways. Other useless calculations are useless like railing against "think tanks" or facebook or amazon or Trumpsters.
(Score: 2, Troll) by inertnet on Sunday July 14 2019, @12:32PM
Or supercomputers trying to simulate climate for centuries ahead.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday July 14 2019, @09:02AM (7 children)
Considering the amount of entertainment provided for a very large amount of the population 1% might not really be that much, or bad. It might actually be "cheap". If there had been no streaming and all these people should instead go out and about and do things to get their required form of entertainment or fun wouldn't that consume the same or just as much CO^2. Or do they just assume that if there was no streaming they would all just sit at home starring at the walls and do nothing? I think it might actually be a lot better if they stayed at home and just streamed all day long.
The numbers seem a bit odd but still 1/3 is On-demand video ala Netflix (sounds very high), 1/3 is Porn and the other 1/3 is EVERYTHING else? Can't porn be on-demand video? Waiting for the anti-piracy group staring to label stream-pirates as being anti-earth and environment ... It seems about stupid enough to actually work.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @09:12AM
Like people did in the 1950s to 1990s - "hang out", which generally involved lots of driving around, at least in wealthy countries.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Sunday July 14 2019, @12:09PM (1 child)
Exactly this. Seeing how much time people spend looking at this stuff, I'm surprised and pleased to see it only creates 1% of CO2. If they were not sitting at home looking at Netfix or porn, I bet that they would be doing something that would create a lot more CO2, like driving to the cinema or flying to Bangkok every few weeks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:38PM
Bububut! I watch my neflicks porn WHILE flying to Bang-cock!
You insensitive clod!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 14 2019, @03:12PM
Compare the dollar cost of streaming an hour of video, to the dollar cost of driving for an hour to get to a cinema. The cost of streaming is vanishingly small. The carbon cost, ditto. Like you, I think the "think tank" must be off their meds.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Sunday July 14 2019, @08:43PM (1 child)
I agree with the high resolution part though.
Video is extremely expensive data-wise, and high resolution video is quadratically more expensive. But higher resolution video does not produce quadratically more entertainment value.
1080 is more than sufficient. We don't need this 5K, 8K bullshit.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday July 15 2019, @04:09AM
Hear hear!
640k480p ought to be enough for anybody [quoteinvestigator.com](Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2019, @03:01AM
I watch my pron in a small window, must be pretty low res compared to going full screen.
Just doing my bit...
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday July 14 2019, @10:35AM
Be interesting to see someone make a wedge issue of javascript between coders and greens.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday July 14 2019, @11:38AM (2 children)
idk i look through te comments and maybe we all know this here on this particular forum or we are just tired of arguing.
But from the perspective of freedom and economy and decentralization and good engineering principles, the concept of streaming is anti-thetical to the internet and is a technology that is breaking more advanced technologies in order to imitate old awful technologies and laws meant to stop history in its tracks.
'On demand' is a misnomer, oxymoron, weaponized term that maybe we should drop. I watched the movie bright last night 'on demand', in the sense I downloaded it over 30 minutes and watched the mp4 of mkv on vlc using very little electricity and making no demands of low-latency bits over the WAN.
The idea that out of every movie in the world and every office episode must be able to be started at any hour of the day and that several million bits must at that moment obey my command across computers and routing equipment owned, licensed and argued over by a dozen different business entities, is what is laughable here.
People want a magic television that magically solves the problem of copyright and magically transmits and they refuse to think through what it is they are asking for, technology and programmers to solve a problem of political economy that the many years of the TPP secret argumentation could not solve.
Netflix has maximum money and they tried to buy all the content and they couldn't do it. Think that over. They didn't deem it worthy to buy Party Down, one of the best low budget shows probably ever produced. Or they couldn't negotiate a price. But whatever the case, it didn't work, now to watch Party Down legally on the internet, you have to have a Starz subscription or break the law.
This is why we can't have nice things, Party Down is not a file, it is Party Down(tm)(copyrighted 200x)(ltd), it is a company of people working until the end of time to get more money for work that has already been completed.
So this magical collection of all media you can get 'on demand' is 100TB of data and then legal connections to literally a million organized people and business entities who just say 'give me more' all day long. It's a monster.
When we say we want art in society, we say we want pretty and nice things, we want interesting things, we want things to do on the weekend for leisure and that provoke thought and question aestetic and many things, but the Art Industry(which maybe like me you have also had bad personal esperiences with like me), which is antithetical to all this. And it is rent-seeking, the industry seeks to make money from air, from a file, that is the most easy thing to distribute and most difficult thing to protect.
When you are looking at an impossible technical or economic problem, and say the entire planet is at stake due to the need to trim some actual empirical energy usage figures, a totally normal situation in the course of sentient life in the universe, here is a train of thought:
1 say something intelligent
2 when you are stuck question your assumptions
3 consider if you are using the wrong tool for the job
4 consider if you are doing something that is wrong anyway and shouldn't be done
I propose the eradication of the term 'on demand' and tell people for the good of the internet and the planet, we accept that if we are planning to watch some Teevee shows tonight, that we pre-load those shows on our device before. Maybe there can be a market for instant-TV but it should be expensive, because these heat and energy costs are being externalized and absorbed by people living on the coast in bangladesh who don't get to watch any episodes of the office.
Second I propose an end to copyright speculation. I would like to see an organization of artists take control of all copyrights of dead artists over the course of a long time, and for all artists and creators of coprighted content to band together to form such an organization or organizations, so that the proceeds from the work of dead artists can be used to actually make a functional and ethical art industry, where there is no such thing as a starving artist.
1. Transition to pre-loading and change the indusry paradigm from streaming to torrent-like latency-friendly distribution protocols
2. Artists guilds take back the copyrights of our work
3. Artists and creators take back their industry from the suits
4. People who don't work or create stop earning free money from the effort of dead people who did work
But I know, who cares what I think, I'm just a guy who has written millions of words and other things and hasn't been able to earn a single cent and if I die almost all of it will be used to generate money for people I don't like for the rest of time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by melikamp on Monday July 15 2019, @04:58AM
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 15 2019, @03:38PM
Prior to YouTube there were videos on the web. And you downloaded them. And then viewed them.
When YouTube appeared, it was convenient. Or not. Depending if you had Flash, and was on Linux.
But why must we waste the bandwidth to watch the same video a second time? Why not download it once and keep it locally for as long as the downloader wants to keep it? Ah, because ads, and they need you to keep coming back to their site for each and every time you want to watch.
And, because of copyright.
But back then it wasn't difficult at all to figure out the URL to directly download Youtube videos as local files.
By the time Netflix came along, I and everyone else had already accepted the idea that you re-download a video every time you watch it.
There was talk about how Netflix traffic was the vast majority of all packets transferred on the internet. So why not download the video exactly once?
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @12:30PM
this meme nails it
https://www.genolve.com/design/socialmedia/memes?creation=3a1fb5f99e0d44a9957d23673cbc92d1 [genolve.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @12:30PM (1 child)
45% of the so-called "emissions" aren't from streaming video at all, but instead the emissions generated during the production of consumer electronics, because no one bought TVs before streaming video. More than 1/3 of the rest is the electricity used by the TV itself, which no one ever watched before streaming video. Streaming probably saves energy there since people might turn the TV off when they're done instead of just wandering away and leaving it on like with broadcast TV.
Most of the rest is from data centers would be turned on anyway. Internet and data center power consumption is not linear with data usage, at all.
All this is assuming the "report" is credible, which it absolutely is not. The Shift Project is an explicitly anti-technology group dedicated to the elimination of technology from everyday life, and while the report does contain a bibliography, it does not contain actual methodology or data, only summaries. It is exactly as credible as a report from Philip Morris saying "smoking doesn't cause cancer, trust us." I figured they'd be environmentalist wackos, but they're actually Luddite wackos.
I guarantee that streaming video produces less CO2 than driving to the video store or the movies.
And if a typical person watches two hours of streaming video per day, that's about 12% of their awake time. If that only produces 1% of emissions, it seems like streaming video is one of the best ways to spend time.
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Sunday July 14 2019, @07:07PM
A large part of the green contingent is religion for the non religious. Meaning that what they really want is an excuse to say they are better than you and to regulate away your fun. Streaming may use some energy but it is obvious that it is better than the alternatives for carbon use. I'm a fan of doing things efficiently for multiple reasons, green interests among them. These people damage the legit green cause by chasing away so much of the population with their shameless hatred for the happiness of others. I blame them and their type for coal rolling and Tesla vandalism.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @12:51PM (2 children)
Oh Jesus tapdancing christ.
I am going to go burn some Styrofoam to offset the stupidity
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @06:34PM
I'm going to help conserve greenhouse gas emissions by replacing my 44" HDTV with my old 1962 RCA 36" color TV... The one that hums and uses power like a refrigerator with the door stuck open.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @10:08PM
Koyter, your wasted brain power over a few decades is probably sufficient :)
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday July 14 2019, @04:02PM (3 children)
I agree with commenters that have already pointed out that the paper completely fails to consider what will substitute for digital entertainment. Also, what is the real cost savings associated with less consumption on the large pieces of digital infrastructure that cannot be shut off as simply as the receiving device in people's homes? Yes, I know that the growth numbers are big, but whatever is in place still has to be up and running, often by passing around idle characters, control, or other data used for status, alarms and signaling. You might save a little on power and HVAC costs at central offices that are under a lighter load, but you won’t be powering down racks of equipment just because you’re streaming less digital content. On demand or not, having overcapacity to handle the bursty nature of Internet traffic has been a fundamental aspect of network design from the beginning.
I also can’t help but feel a sense moralizing judgmentalism when I hear a term like Digital Sobriety. Why the big focus on content instead of smart scheduling algorithms and services that reduce the need for overcapacity? The content based approach could end up being the thin edge of a censorship wedge. And it seems like the authors have a hard on for citing digital pornography, which in my mind raises suspicions that there may be a hidden agenda that is not purely environmental in nature.
I’ll give them credit for raising awareness, but I’m really uncomfortable with their concept that this problem is more societal than marketing or technical.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @10:06PM (1 child)
It's a constant theme among the Marxist academics. "People are happy and comfortable, what can we do to stop that?"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday July 14 2019, @11:11PM
They need to keep the struggle alive so we don't all turn into the bourgeoisie (even tho that is in reality one of the utter failures of Marxism today -- most of the people in the west are not workers anymore but middle class enemies), cause then all would be lost and there would be no workers paradise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2019, @02:45PM
> what will substitute for digital entertainment.
Have we really fallen that far from grace?
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Sunday July 14 2019, @06:20PM
So, was this study funded by Time Warner/Comcast etc?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @06:46PM
Blackhole their brainfarts.
(Score: 1) by hwertz on Monday July 15 2019, @06:57AM (1 child)
"The report says regulation will be necessary."
Not disagreeing with the rest, but I DON'T think regulation will be necessary.
Netflix, youtube, etc. already pursue more efficient compression methods (smaller size for same quality) since it reduces the ol' bandwidth bill (lowering operating expenses), and pursue more power-efficient servers as well as more efficient data center designs (both cutting operating expense and allowing the good PR of having "greener" data centers.) Regulation on this portion is just meddling
I'm surprised they don't already adjust quality for screen size (they don't... streaming a 4k video onto a 4 inch screen is dumb and so is 1080 for that matter) but I don't think it would come to legislation for that either. I'd assume the pieces are there to figure out approximate screen size (and if it's being cast to a probably much larger screen), so it's just a matter of customer demand and they could add this to their streaming apps. Pointing out "you save data with no noticeable loss", and "it would save tons of CO2 a year" would probably be enough to make most people go for it; just leave in the manual option for those few who insist they must have top quality, and others who want to turn quality down further to save more data.
As for autoplay.. I'm a libertarian so I don't believe something like this should be legislated. But this would be the one part where they'd probably have "pushback" (more videos autoplaying means more ads playing). I could see even a nice grass roots campaign of "having autoplay off by default saves x tons of CO2 a year, kindly implement it" from many users being met with "suggestion noted" and nothing being changed. So, I could see this requiring legislation if it was going to be changed.
(Score: 1) by hwertz on Monday July 15 2019, @07:11AM
OK I said I didn't disagree with the report except for the "regulation is needed"...
well, I went through some good chunk of the report. Never mind, I pretty much *DO* disagree with the rest. I won't disagree with their estimate of how much CO2 is being used... but going back from unlimited to limited data plans, taking the view that people should be FORCED to curb data usage (rather than just making things more efficient), and that some flunkies should decide which usages are more societally useful? These are all quite distasteful to me.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday July 15 2019, @05:36PM
People need to eat, and they like to be entertained. You're much more likely to get random person x 1,000,000 to carpool, before they give up their source of entertainment. The rest is economics. So long as it's profitable to provide entertainment in such a way, then it will be done. Humans have a carbon footprint. It would be much more interesting to see these carbon dioxide numbers compared to television, and hollywood. How much carbon dioxide is released with the production of one episode of Friends vs one episode of Orange is the New Black vs one episode of Dr. Who? How about Titanic vs Godzilla vs Thor? At some point, you're just saying, stop having fun, and don't do these things that we think you shouldn't do. So, just another person(s)/entity trying to control what we do.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"