| JackHandy said: Not much, personally. The whole house of people? Something like 550GB last month. Not much either. |
Well cable / ota tv and renting physical media is definitely better for the environment. Most of data consumption and storage is video streaming.
For games it comes down to how many times a physical game gets used (re-installs, sharing, reselling) vs how many times that game would get downloaded. If one physical game disk prevents more than 128 GB worth of downloaded data, it is better for the environment in the long run.
I wonder what the carbon footprint of you tube is, ah about 10Mt CO2e (Million Metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent)
Netflix has announced that in 2020, one hour of streaming on its platform used about a hundred grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (100gCO2e) That is equivalent to driving an average car to about 1.2 kms. Or, in other words, it’s enough to power a 75W ceiling fan for about six hours in Europe
Scientists at the UK's Royal Society have previously suggested that streaming a video in standard definition (SD) can cut your carbon emissions to about eight times as compared to watching it in 4K resolution.
And of course 'watching' music videos, do you really need the video part. A first easy step would be browsers realizing when a video doesn't have the focus and then not streaming the video, just the audio. Reduce the time until Netflix asks if you're still awake, smarter sleep timers. Dunno why tvs don't have a simple motion sensor as a sleep timer option. Many people fall asleep with the tv on, which not only costs extra energy but also keeps on streaming whatever was on.
