this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2021
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What an absolutely ridiculous premise. This is like how corporations paid for campaigns to blame ecological destruction on consumers for not properly recycling in order to completely shift the conversation away from their deliberate and massive exploitation of resources.
We can have ****ing online video we just need to replace cars with trains and fossil fuels with wind and solar... aghhghghhgg
I disagree. Data-centers use a significant amount of energy world-wide and as the figures in the article show, a really large part of the internet usage today comes from video streaming (>50%). It is worth considering what do do about that.
At least we don't need 4K streaming or game streaming services that basically just run the same hardware in a data-center and make you download the same game over and over again. Same for music (although the size is very small for that). For movies I am not sure, as people usually only watch it once and thus a normal download would not make a real difference. But at least by default movies should come at a lower streaming quality.
In general I think it is worth thinking about data-center energy use. The hardware used in data-centers is usually extremely energy hungry and cooling requirements add to that as well. Of course it does not always make sense to run and store everything at the consumer level either, but for mostly non-technical reason (forcing people into expensive subscription services) a lot of things have been moved into the cloud that were before done in much more efficient local applications.
edit: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y
It seems like drm schemes cause a lot of the bloat. Everything being locked behind subscription fees with no option to permanently download means you have to download every viewing. And then most of the time the file is cut up into pieces and bounced around different servers to slow down pirates.
People not watching videos is not the way that gets done. That is a simply regressive solution, not a progressive one. If we all stop demanding video streaming, we have reduced the utility of the internet, because people love to watch videos. However, if we incentivize data centers to focus renewables, then we get to keep the utility from watching videos, and electricity generation is net cleaner. Progressive versus regressive, the decision is yours. But judging by your comment, you'd rather die on a hill defending a poorly thought out argument.
Where did I say that there should be no video streaming on the internet? I said that it is worth thinking about how to reduce the relatively big environmental impact it has, especially as most people are not aware at all about the massive data-center requirements of it.