SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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?
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious