Streaming Carbon Footprint

Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media

Streaming media is calculated to contribute a surprising 1% of global greenhouse gases, because most regions of the world obtain electricity from fossil fuels to power their data centers, networks, and devices. Streaming large files in large quantities, then, ethically implicates spectators in the warming of the planet. Bad news — but we have some solutions!

Our research addresses the high and rising electricity consumption of information and communication technologies (ICT), which consume as much as 7% of global electricity (Andrae 2020). Given that globally about 80% of electricity comes from fossil fuels, this means that ICT is responsible for 2.7% to 3.3% of global greenhouse gases (Lorincz et al. 2019, Belkhir & Elmeligi 2018).

Streaming media – video on demand (e.g. Netflix, Crave), porn, YouTube, games, video conferencing, etc. – contributes more than any other sector to this increase (Cisco 2020). People are streaming video at higher volumes and higher definition, and media and telecom corporations cheerfully encourage us to do so. The Covid-19 pandemic is accelerating this crisis, as people are stuck at home and seeking entertainment and relief. Meanwhile, what we might call “streaming impact denial” plays into the notion that online media are “virtual” and do not impact the environment.

Unchecked, the carbon emissions resulting from ICT could exceed 14% of the 2016-level worldwide GHGE by 2040 (Belkhir & Elmeligi 2018, The Shift Project 2019). It is urgent to immediately reduce that figure, and the rising share of streaming media, through education and policy changes.

The team

Laura U. Marks, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
Stephen Makonin, School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Simon Fraser University. Principal Investigator of the SFU Computational Sustainability Lab
Radek Przedpełski, postdoctoral fellow, School for the Contemporary Arts
Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva, PhD student, School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University

Our group is on it!

We:

Critically assess engineering research on the environmental impact of ICT and streaming media, identify the most reliable results, and develop streaming media energy usage and carbon footprint calculator
Measure the electricity consumption involved in streaming media through case studies in British Columbia, and produce tools to accurately calculate its carbon footprint
Inform policymakers of the most promising policies and practices at governmental, institutional, and individual levels
Adhere to an open, reproducible science philosophy
Advocate alternatives to HD streaming, on fronts including carbon taxes for streaming services; simple alternatives like watching television and borrowing DVDs; and low-bandwidth streaming media
Teach media makers how to make small-file videos, with technical and aesthetic tips
Share the beauties of appropriate technology through the Small File Media Festival

Small File Media Festival

The First Annual Small File Media Festival (August 10-20, 2020), featuring movies under 5 megabytes each, showed that great cinema doesn’t have to mean great big files! We received over 100 submissions from around the world, with ingenious creative solutions including animation, GIFs, low frame rates, datamoshing, executable files, “obsolete” technologies, and creative compression. More info at smallfil e.ca

The Small File Media Festival team is:

Laura U. Marks, founder
Sophia Biedka, festival organizer, independent filmmaker
Joey Malbon, festival organizer, media activist
Radek Przedpełski, postdoctoral fellow, School for the Contemporary Arts
Faune Ybarra, visual artist
Sanjana Karthik, activist and high-school student

Upcoming Workshops

Small File Media Aesthetics & Politics
Presented by VIVO Media Art Centre
9 hours over 3 sessions | Online
March 20 & 27 & April 3, 2021
$94 / $58 for members / by donation for those facing reduced income due to COVID-19

Session 1: Sat., Mar. 20 | 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Session 2: Sat., Mar. 27 | 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Session 3: Sat., Apr. 3 | 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM

TICKETS HERE

Small File Media Aesthetics & Politics
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
Date & Time: TBA
Please check back

Carbon footprint of online teaching

This year, PhD student Yani Kong, with Marks, is working with SFU's IT department to analyze the carbon footprint of online teaching. Check back here for updates about this project!

Carbon footprint calculators

The French think tank The Shift Project has extensive calculators that you can download via the document "Lean ICT Materials" HERE.

Marks, Makonin, and Rodriguez-Silva, in order to verify The Shift Project's results, are working on an independent streaming carbon footprint calculator. Here's what we have so far:

Calculating the carbon footprint of a streaming program (in our article in Media + Environment):

    Length of the streaming video in hours x gigabytes per hour for a given resolution (Summerson 2018)*:
        480 pixels: ~792 MB/hour
        720p: ~1.3 GB/hour
        1080p: ~1.9-2.55 GB/hour (average 2.225)
        1440p: ~2.8 GB/hour
        4K: ~3.5-7 GB/hour
    x energy intensity: 4.91 kWh/GB (see above)
    x number of unique viewers
    x 0.707 kgCO₂e/kWh: Environmental Protection Agency 2020)
    = carbon footprint in kilograms of CO₂e (CO₂and other greenhouse gases).

* Summerson uses Netflix’s streaming bitrate. Note that Netflix is more energy efficient than other platforms.

Updated: February, 2021.

Joseph Clark’s energy intensity calculator (in our article in Media + Environment):

Multiply file size in gigabytes by 5 kWh/GB to get energy in kilowatts.

Example: Streaming a high resolution copy of a 10 minute newsreel (500MB) is about 2.5 kWh. That, according to the owner’s manual for Joe’s clothes dryer, is about the equivalent of drying one load of laundry.

Events

February 9: Marks, with Makonin and Rodriguez-Silva, will talk about our research in IT Engineering.

March 9: Przedpełski, with Marks, will talk about the Small File Media Festival as part of Anne Pasek's (Trent U.) Low-Carbon Methods series. More info HERE.

March 23 – 25: The team will talk about our interdisciplinary method at the New Materialist Informatics conference, Kassel. More info HERE.

April 2: Marks, small-file program and talk for Colgate University, Colgate, NY.

April 6: Marks, keynote talk, "Streaming Media, Online Conferences, and the Jevons Paradox," at the British Association for American Studies online conference. More info HERE.

Some of our publications

Laura U. Marks, Joseph Clark, Jason Livingston, Denise Oleksijczuk, and Lucas Hilderbrand, “Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact,” Media + Environment.
Laura U. Marks, “Small-File Movies: Saving the planet, one pixel at a time .” Millennium Film Journal 71/72 (December 2020).
Laura U. Marks and Stephen Makonin, “Streaming video is overheating the planet.” Op-ed, The Vancouver Sun. August 15, 2020.
Yani Kong, “Tiny movies at the end of the world,” SFU School for the Contemporary Arts.
Radek Przedpełski, “The environmental cost of binge-watching,” Science Gallery, Dublin.
Laura U. Marks, “Let’s Deal with the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media,” Afterimage 47:2 (2020): 46-52.
Laura U. Marks, “Streaming video, a surprising link between pandemic and climate crisis,” Journal of Visual Culture and Harun Farocki Institut special issue on Covid-19 (April 2020)

Our research is partially funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s program Living within the Earth's Carrying Capacity

References

Andrae, Anders. 2020. “New Perspectives On Internet Electricity Use in 2030,” Engineering Applied Science Letters 3:2: 19-31.
Belkhir, Lotfi, and Ahmed Elmeigli. 2018. “Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations.” Journal of Cleaner Production 177:448: 448-463.
Cisco. 2020. “Cisco Annual Internet Report (2018–2023).”
Environmental Protection Agency. 2020. Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator.
Lorincz, J, A Capone, & J Wu. 2019. “Greener, Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Networks: State-Of- The-Art and New Trends.” Sensors 19:4864. 29 pages.
Summerson, Cameron. 2018. “How Much Data Does Netflix Use?” How-To Geek.
The Shift Project. 2019. “Climate Crisis: The Unsustainable Use of Online Video.”

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