Video Streaming Services Have A Large Carbon Footprint
If there’s one thing people did more of in the last year, it’s watching their favorite video streaming service. However, one thing that often gets overlooked is the environmental impact streaming services have.
Streaming services require servers at a remote location that operate 24/7. These servers use huge amounts of energy as a result, thus they have a large carbon footprint. In 2020, Netflix alone had a carbon footprint of 1.1 metric tons of carbon.
Individually, streaming a single video would be inconsequential, as it requires a small amount of electricity to do so. However, when millions of other videos are being streamed simultaneously, it’s a very different story.
Especially when many data centers are still powered by fossil fuels instead of renewables.
People Are Beginning to Stream Video Games
Of course, the streaming industry has now expanded past just video content. Now you can even stream videos games.
Services like PlayStation Now, Xbox Game Pass, and Google Stadia have millions of customers and offer video game streaming. And these services use more energy than traditional video streaming platforms.
In theory, it should be more efficient to stream games than for each person to have a dedicated device, however, research has disproven it. If 90% of the game population switched to streaming services, emissions would increase by 112% for this industry.
That said, cloud-based gaming is still in the early stages of its life. As the technology ages, the impact will certainly lessen.
YouTube Has the Biggest Streaming Footprint
While many may believe YouTube to be a video streaming service, it is. And it has the biggest carbon-footprint in the industry.
YouTube has an annual carbon footprint of 10 million metric tons of carbon. And according to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator, that’s the equivalent of 11,052,834,932 pounds of coal burned.
It’s a huge footprint that dwarfs Netflix.
However, when you consider that over 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day, it’s not hard to see why its carbon footprint is huge. And its popularity continues to grow.
Especially since video content is now the most popular form of content on the internet.
Improvements Are Already On the Way
Luckily, the industry is fully aware of the problem and some of the biggest players are moving very fast to address it.
For instance, Netflix, which still remains the largest streaming service in the world, announced this year that it will become carbon-neutral by 2022. That’s next year!
It will do this by reducing the emissions that it can control, deploying carbon storage projects, and removing carbon from the atmosphere.
However, there is one caveat to this claim. Netflix does not consider emissions from the devices that customers use to view their service. This means that the electricity usage from televisions and streaming devices is not a factor in their calculations.
Other streaming services are also looking at ways to reduce electricity. The industry as a whole has seen data center’s electricity usage decline over the years, despite the number of people using them increasing.
If these trends continue, the streaming industry will fix its emissions problem.
Robert has been following and writing about environmental stories for years at GreenGeeks. He believes that highlighting environmentally friendly practices can help promote change in every household.
