And remember those TV emissions take place whether you are watching a regular broadcast or streaming, and broadcast TV is still far more popular than streaming.” “The big footprint is TVs, which are getting bigger. “The majority of the carbon-per-hour video streaming produces is in the home,” he says. He cites factors such as 20%-plus annual improvement in efficiency in networks and datacentres that offsets some of the increase. However, Schien cautions that the inexorable growth of 50% annually on average in demand for capacity does not directly correlate to the same rate of increase in carbon emissions. The growth in internet traffic has been stratospheric in the last few years, with as much as 80% of the data capacity taken up by the popularity of the bandwidth-heavy services of a handful of companies such as Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Activision Blizzard, which makes Call of Duty, and Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite. “Exclusion of that part of the footprint will undermine the ability to manage and reduce it.” “The calculation of carbon footprint should include user devices as that is where the digital services are being consumed,” says Daniel Schien, senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Bristol, whose carbon modelling tool has been used by Netflix, the BBC and the Carbon Trust among others. In a blog explaining how it estimates emissions, Netflix said internet service providers and device manufacturers, such as TV, iPad and mobile phone makers, should “ideally account for those emissions themselves”. Netflix’s net zero plan is only based on the carbon footprint of its corporate operations and the making of films and TV shows. One thorny issue is whether the emissions run up by consumers watching the shows should be factored in. “We have created Greening of Streaming because we know there is sufficient appetite within the streaming sector to make positive changes to reduce this environmental impact, and because the technology is there to make it achievable.” “Net zero has become the new carbon tax off-setting, to be able to say: ‘This is not my problem.’ There has to be a reduction engineered within businesses, not just an accounting trick, to make a difference,” he says. Robinson says such strategies must involve major reductions in emissions rather than just investing in green projects if they are to achieve carbon neutrality. In the UK, companies including BT, the BBC and Sky have promised to hit net zero by 2030. The move follows similar climate-friendly aspirations announced in recent years by the large Silicon Valley companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Facebook. Given YouTube had 1.4 billion users that year, and now has more than 2.4 billion users globally, the company’s carbon footprint will be significantly bigger today.Įarlier this year, Netflix announced its aim to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by the end of 2022. Photograph: Netflix/Kobal/Rex/ShutterstockĪs for YouTube, a report by researchers at Bristol University based on estimates of the streaming site’s usage in 2016, calculated that watching videos on the streaming site produced CO2e of more than 11m tonnes a year, similar to a city the size of Glasgow or Frankfurt. Netflix reported fans clocked up more than 6bn hours watching its top 10 shows in the first 28 days after each show was released.
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