“On a one-to-one basis… streaming can be better for the environment. But we have to consider that the changes in viewing behavior have been made, and I think a lot of those changes are here to stay,” he said. “With content being at your fingertips, it’s hard to take that away. Pandora’s box has been opened, so to speak.”
Another thing that's changing is the quality of the media we're using. A minute of HD video, which might have been the standard back when the studies were done, is only about 105MB of data. That rises to roughly 150MB for 1080p and 320MB for 4K video, meaning an hour of video could now mean 17 times the emissions. That's larger than most of the margins seen in the earlier studies.
There are ways to make the act of watching a movie or TV show greener, however. In terms of streaming, Tabata noted that governments could consider preferentially allocating electricity from renewables to the servers. Streaming services could also locate servers in countries that use more renewable sources, though this could bring up privacy and security concerns, he wrote. Nair’s paper suggests that viewers can save power on their TV by reducing color contrast and brightness, switching to eco-friendly mode if possible, and purchasing more energy-efficient models. The paper also suggested that as the energy grid becomes greener, the environmental load of powering a TV and transmitting data will decline as well. “With a little constraint and good purchasing decisions, the subscriber can have their cake and watch it, too,” the paper concludes.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/...t-by-streaming/?utm_social-type=owned
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