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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