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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Any evidence behind your claim?

I have a hard time believing that streaming data from memory over a network can be so energy demanding, there's little computation involved.

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I dont feel like putting together a study but just look up the energy/co2/environment cost to stream one hour of video. You will see it is an order of magnitude higher than other uses like AI.

The European average is 56 grams of CO2 emissions per hour of video streaming. For comparison: 100 meters to drive causes 22 grams of CO2.

https://www.ndc-garbe.com/data-center-how-much-energy-does-a...

80 percent of the electricity consumption on the Internet is caused by streaming services

Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission.

An hour of video streaming needs more than three times more energy than a HD stream in 4K quality, according to the Borderstep Institute. On a 65-inch TV, it causes 610 grams of CO2 per hour.

https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/netflix-d...

AI energy claims are misrepresented by excluding the training steps. If it wasn't using that much more energy then they wouldn't need to build so many new data centers, use so much more water, and our power bills wouldn't increase to subsidize it.

I assume the energy claims for Netflix don't take into account the total consumption of the content production either.

> Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission.

It's probably a gigabyte per time unit for a watt, or a joule/watt-hour for a gigabyte. Otherwise this doesn't make mathematical sense. And 91W per Gb/s (or even GB/s) is a joke. 91Wh for a gigabyte (let alone gigabit) of data is ridiculous.

Also don't trust anything Telekom says, they're cunts that double dip on both peering and subscriber traffic and charge out of the ass for both (10x on the ISP side compared to competitors), coming up with bullshit excuses like 'oh streaming services are sooo expensive for us' (of course theyare if refuse to let CDNs plop in edge cache nodes in your infra in a settlement-free agreement like everyone else does). They're commonly understood to be the reason why Internet access in Germany is so shitty and expensive compares to neighbouring countries.

"According to the Carbon Trust, the home TV, speakers, and Wi-Fi router together account for 90 percent of CO2 emissions from video streaming. A fraction of one percent is attributed to the streaming providers' data servers, and ten percent to data transmission within the networks."

It's the devices themselves that contribute the most to CO2 emissions. The streaming servers themselves are nothing like the problem the AI data centres are.

And then compare that to the alternative. When I was a kid you had to drive to Blockbuster to rent the movie. If it's a 2 hour movie and the store is 1 mile away, that's 704g CO2 vs 112g to stream. People complaining about internet energy consumption never consider what it replaces.

You were not nearly watching as much

From your last link, the majority of that energy usage is coming from the viewing device, and not the actual streaming. So you could switch away from streaming to local-media only and see less than a 10% decrease in CO2 per hour.

I see GP is talking more about Netflix and the like, but user-generated video is horrendously expensive too. I'm pretty sure that, at least before the gen AI boom, ffmpeg was by far the biggest consumer of Google's total computational capacity, like 10-20%.

The ecology argument just seems self-defeating for tech nerds. We aren't exactly planting trees out here.

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