Meanwhile DVDs are relatively democratic and unencumbered way of distributing video. Netflix can make any movie available via dvd without licensing or asking permission.
I found it to be a very good way of getting high quality movies from the largest selection.
But your complaint seems to sidestep all this, sort of like complaining that paper money wastes so many unneeded trees without acknowledging the huge benefits.
It's such a disingenuous argument from people who hate physical media for irrational reasons and want everyone locked into the streamers platforms with no control over their media and streamers who have no incentives to preserve media. If you think that streaming is equivalent in availability to what Netflix DVD had you are mistaken.
> The energy intensity figures for data centres and data transmission networks were updated to reflect more recent data and research. As a result, the central IEA estimate for one hour of streaming video in 2019 is now 36gCO2, down from 82gCO2 in the original analysis published in February 2020.
> New passenger cars generally emit from 90 (smaller cars) to 150 (larger cars) grams of CO2 (yes, it's the weight of the whole carbon dioxide, not just the carbon in it) per kilometer.
Disks could be still better, if you rent 20 of them at once.
I'm baffled to see such an innumerate take on HackerNews of all places. Yearly US per capita plastic consumption is a few hundred kg. How much do you think a netflix subscription adds to that?
Almost every problem can be divided into many tiny ones, and solution to each tiny problem can be ridiculed that it solves only tiny bit of a problem.
There are bigger problems for sure but there is also "there are bigger problems" fallacy (aka fallacy of relative privation).
I'd rather have people kick back on their couch and watch a Netflix DVD instead of feeling great that they saved so much plastic, and then smugly drive their SUV to the next shopping mall.
It's probably an impossible question to answer.
As an hn'er you should be used to premature optimization ;)
In reality of course there are a few big things that matter, and lots of tiny things (like Netflix DVD rentals) that don't. Two of the main sources of plastic waste are the packaging and textile industries. If you have a fast fashion habit it's pretty easy (and, at often single-digit $ prices per item, widely affordable) to rack up a few kg of plastic waste per year (a non-trivial fraction as micro-plastics). Now how much plastic waste do you estimate a Netflix DVD habit creates in comparison?
The best case scenario of the innumerate and self-righteous setting environmental agendas is that rather than addressing the big problems, attention gets frittered away on non-problems.
Often, of course what happens is that you end up with something that's much worse than doing nothing. Like for example the bogus plastic recycling policies enthusiastically enacted in much of the Western world, which saw to it that a lot of stuff which would have ended up harmlessly in landfills was loving hand-cleaned and shipped around half the world to Asia to be then dumped into the Oceans. Or “Green” politicians building brown coal plants like crazy.
You are comparing single DVD rental company with whole textile industry -> fallacy of relative privation.
Some of us just see a positive that less trash will be produced, less stuff will be moved around and you start mentioning "setting environmental agendas". How are those thing related? We cannot be happy until in single stroke we fix over 50% of a global problem? That will never happen.
You mention plastic recycling - I agree it is either pointless or harmful, depending how you look at. it. Do you really consider that not producing trash is also a failed policy? If not why are you doing this comparison?
I know it’s some naïve idealism, but I would love to see the world where we, as human race, choose to do nothing rather than trash our planet even more. I may sound like a crazy ecology fanatic (I’m not yet), yet I’m becoming more and more worried over all this. While the other commenter legitimately pointed out that servers aren’t free (ecology wise) either, I think they can be optimised over time. Shipping physical disks, I don’t see as rational these days. Even when it gets you money, discard half of your customers and the other half would switch to subscription anyway, you just push them to do that earlier.
I don't understand this comment - it might make sense as a (bad) pitch for digitising Netflix in the 2000s, but the millions of FTE days to do that have already been pitched, paid for and worked. What is this adding?
Replace - I'm not sure how much I can add on top of what we've already said, that Netflix has been replacing its mail order business with digital for the last 15 years or so.
When you license a show via a streaming service, you don’t own anything.
This is the problem with the tech economy. The consumers don’t own anything. They just rent.
When I download a movie this way, I truly own it. Same as I own a DVD disk. It’s just the medium that is different. E.g. I have a collection of Friends on disks, which is legal, I own it. But when it’s ripped as files and stored on an old hdd so I could rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB. I assume it is likely to be illegal.
The thing is, copyright holders think it’s wrong, and they want us to rent the content, not own it. I mean it could be done other way technologically, avoiding physical medium and still making it legal somehow. It could be done if the party was interested in it. The problem is not in the physical medium itself.
When you download a pirated copy, it's more likely that you _possess_ it, rather than _owning_ it. You are in control of the bits and bytes, they will not just disappear; but since your copy is unlicensed and illicit, the copyright holder could take legal steps to make you delete your copy (and pay for your infringement on their copyright).
> Same as I own a DVD disk.
That's different. You own the physical disc, and the right to re-sell or potentially lend out that physical disc. (However, you can't take the data from that disc, and stream it to a public audience on the internet.)
> [...] rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB
Depends on your jurisdiction, but in many places it is legal for you to create a backup of a physical disc that you own, and make personal use of that backup. In some places you are allowed to share your backup copy with friends and family (on a non-commercial basis, of course). It gets nuanced.
Only because the laws say that physical media is treated differently. If the law said that you could buy a disk and then stream as many copies as you have of the disk, it would completely change the business model.
But the law doesn't say that.
Yes, we could have compulsory licensing, like with music on the radio.
If radio stations have a copy of a song, then provided they pay the legally-mandated royalties to the rightsholder, they can play it. They don't need to negotiate with the rightsholder, and the rightsholder cannot prevent them from playing it.
We have a working model for how it can work, so we could do the same thing with TV shows and movies on OTA/cable/streaming... but we just don't.
I would give a grace period to allow for exclusives; 2 years from release, maybe.
Popcorn Time (free torrenting service) but with a payment of a few cents for each work would be possible. Instead of subscription to lots of expensive services.
IPR is a system maintained by the democratic government, make it work for the people.
> with a payment of a few cents for each work would be possible
This is your problem. You expect millions of hours of work to be available to you for pretty much free.
That said, how much should I pay for an episode of a TV show from 30 years ago where the producers are dead and the other creators are mostly comfortably living in retirement having already earned their living and been paid for their work? The offspring of the people working on the show in many cases probably don't even know that their forbears did such work.
…filmed in the USA, I assume? There’s a tremendous amount of content from other countries that’s not available on any major streaming platform. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of the USA movies that have never been streamed as well.
> You expect millions of hours of work to be available to you for pretty much free.
I don’t think there’s a legal way to watch the majority of movies that have ever been filmed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene
The DVDs avoid all the licensing issues that properly licensed streaming media has because the profit and control for the rights holder ends when the sale of the media happens.
Similarly, the profit and control of the media ends for the rights holder when it enters The Scene for release amongst their myriad distribution channels.
Plus, a stagnating movie/TV shows market based on physical disks only (and on previous theatrical releases) is surely a lot more friendly to the environment compared to a always-going-up movie/TV shows market, a market which has to create a lot more content compared to past times. Creating that content is not friendly to the environment, those film crews don't live based on air alone.
But that won’t go anywhere, so at least physical disks would.
Streaming unfortunately is not a replacement, mostly due to the limited selection of titles and, in the case of Blu-ray/UHD discs, reduced quality.
That's less than an end users TV will utilize, and it's probably also less than a standalone DVD player requires.
It is likely still more efficient to stream than ship on DVDs (I wonder how much it changes with eg. USB flash drives, SD cards or other rewriteable media), but have upfront energy costs that are harder to estimate.
And the postal service, to a rough approximation, already goes by every mailbox every day. Adding an envelope has a smaller impact than a bicycle delivery.
Would a bicycle delivery have been okay? How about 1/10th of the impact of a bicycle delivery?
It takes a lot of people to make internet connections work too.
In my case I have a very good video rental store nearby but now I need to drive somewhere I wasn’t driving before.
(And that a significant part is wasted on running ads doesn't make it any better.)
It is like litter.
Paper ads are somewhat limited due to consumer complaining about having their mailboxes filled with them and someone has to go there and put it in and can't avoid a homeowner guarding the mailbox if they would force the issue.
Using e.g. uBlock Origin might be the most impact for no effort environmentally friendly thing you could possibly do.
In regards to Netflix I suspect there's a streaming bandwidth plateau we will hit (if we have not already): there are only so many hours per day people can watch content, population growth isn't that strong (and can't increase forever), and video resolution then becomes the driver of increased data use (and that probably can't increase forever either).
Right, which is why it's a moral imperative to use an ad-blocker. Ad-blockers avoid displaying ads, which reduces CPU usage for displaying those ads, thus reducing power wastage, and helping the planet.
You shouldn't be special-casing the ads that pay for the pages you visit. All of the tech behind the page is equally good or bad in this sense.
Just because someone tries to give you an advertising flyer as you walk by, doesn't mean you should take it.
That doesn't mean there isn't by the OP's logic a moral imperative to not look at that content, due to the environmental impact. My point is that same imperative should apply equally.
> Just because someone tries to give you an advertising flyer as you walk by, doesn't mean you should take it.
That's a bad analogy, unless someone holding a flyer out pays for a service you consumed.
Are you obligated to actually read the booklet? Or is "no thanks" OK?
But here you seem to be claiming it's ok to visit the event without reading their ad booklet. That's inconsistent.
It would depend on the specifics of each implementation, but shipping 10 discs total over a year is likely to be more efficient than to keep streaming infrastructure up and running for that one movie.
Obviously, the same streaming infrastructure would be used for other content, but how many (unpopular) shows are only watched a few times a year yet they take valuable infrastructure capacity?
And then we get into lack of popularity leading into obsolecence, and we are now talking a much wider topic.
Disk space is cheap. I would assume that they don't really take infrastructure capacity.