The Carbon Footprint of Streaming — Is Our Favorite Pastime Really Destroying the Planet?
As the coronavirus lockdown endures, streaming services are seeing higher numbers than ever before. But what are the real impacts of this increased energy consumption on the environment and how big really is your digital carbon footprint?
Whether it’s Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, or Disney+, most of us pay little attention to the technical aspects of how we are able to stream virtually any show with the push of a button. While it’s easy to understand the environmental impact of bad waste management or a transatlantic flight, the mechanisms at play when you click play on the latest show you decided to binge are far more complex.
In the US, Netflix alone accounts for over 37% of all downstream internet traffic at peak times. In particular, mobile streams from phones and tablets are growing incredibly fast and already account for over 70% of the daily billion hours streamed on YouTube. In 2019, Netflix subscriptions rose to 167 Million worldwide and its global energy consumption increased by 84%. As many competitors like Disney+, HBO max, and Apple TV+ are only joining the market now, the rise in energy consumption could potentially be very worrying. Intuitively, you would think that this rise in energy consumption comes from the increase in devices and screens used to stream. But most of the energy consumption comes from the servers processing these huge amounts of data.
Most major streaming services today use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute their shows to customers. This system provides low latency video streaming by using multiple servers around the planet to balance the ‘workload’. It also ensures the availability of backup servers in case one of them has a malfunction or there is a usual amount of traffic at any given time. For globally available streaming services, having servers in all its markets is very important to ensure continuous and fast availability of content. So the more markets in which the streaming service is available, the more expansive its CDN needs to be i.e. the more servers need to be powered around the world.
But what exactly does a CDN streaming system mean for energy consumption and carbon emissions?
In July of 2019, the Shift Project falsely estimated that watching 1 hour of Netflix is equivalent to 3.2kg of CO2 emissions, the same as driving almost 8 miles. These estimations were reported in a frantic wave of media coverage with shock and awe titles like “The real problem with your Netflix addiction”. Indeed, their estimations have been refuted by many credible sources including the International Energy Agency (IEA). In reality, the electricity required to operate CDN servers and an average TV add up to an estimated 0.1426kWh of electricity. In the US, this roughly translates into 0.0332 kg CO2 emission on average which would be the same as driving 200 yards and not 8 miles. Worldwide, estimations stay between 0.028–0.057kg CO2 emissions depending on the country’s energy sources. If you are interested in a more detailed report of the scientific analysis behind these results, I would recommend taking a look at the IEA’s analysis of why the Shift Project’s results were so exaggerated.
One of the main reasons why streaming is far less environmentally damaging than it was thought by the Shift Project is its omission of digital efficiency. Since the 1940s, energy efficiency is estimated to have doubled every 1.6 years, and every 2.7 years since the 2000s. Like almost every big tech company today, Google recently started using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to digitally optimize their energy consumption. Here, AI has truly started to show its strength as self-improving and learning algorithms surpass any type of ‘human-led’ energy optimization. Using DeepMind (a UK based AI company) Google was able to reduce its energy consumption by over 30% last year. As a result, data centers worldwide consume only about 1% of global electricity use, even though internet traffic has tripled since 2015. And although Netflix’s energy consumption increased by 84% last year, the company is looking to reduce this soon by improving its CDN servers’ energy consumption through AI optimization.
So while streaming does pollute, the numbers aren’t nearly as high as claimed by the Shift Project and we can all relax about our Netflix addiction for now. The bottom line is that streaming is still greener than reading a printed book. But bringing attention to the energy consumption of streaming is still interesting and will perhaps be important down the line. The future of our digital carbon footprint is unclear as new technologies like 5G, blockchain, or virtual reality could push the energy consumption of data centers too far. The question then really is whether AI efficiency improvements will be able to keep up with these new technologies.
