[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2...
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3m6qdf5rffs2...
Today I can have ~8 people streaming from my Jellyfin instance which is a server that consumes about 35W, measured at the wall. That's ~5Wh per hour of content from me not even trying.
Because phones are extremely energy efficient, data transmission accounts for nearly all the electricity consumption when streaming through 4G, especially at higher resolutions (Scenario D). Streaming an hour-long SD video through a phone on WiFi (Scenario C) uses just 0.037 kWh – 170 times less than the estimate from the Shift Project.
They might be folding in wider internet energy usage?https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/carbon-footprint-net...
My understanding is that Netflix can stream 100 Gbps from a 100W server footprint (slide 17 of [0]). Even if you assume every stream is 4k and uses 25 Mbps, that's still thousands of streams. I would guess that the bulk of the power consumption from streaming video is probably from the end-user devices -- a backbone router might consume a couple of kilowatts of power, but it's also moving terabits of traffic.
[0] https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf
It is fair to compare inference to streaming. Both are done by the end user.