It is said streaming, especially video, takes plenty electricity, can be bad for the environment. So I wonder, how does watching Kim Possible on Mickey Channel compare to watching it on Mickey Plus? Similarly, and maybe even better of a comparison, how does listening to something like 623.7 FWGR Radio on FM compare to listening to the station’s online stream?
Electrical engineer here. There is almost no difference.
The cost of streaming video from a server to your computer is pretty small, basically just transferring the bytes from a hard drive to a network card. This happens in a datacenter on a big server designed to be efficient at it, and serve a ton of people at once. Your own electricity consumption on your viewing device is likely much higher than that. You can calculate your electricity consumption using a Kill-A-Watt or similar device, but here are some averages of measurements I’ve made on my devices:
PC with 27" LCD monitor: 150W 50" TV: 300W Laptop with internal 14" screen: 40W Phone with 5" screen: 10W roughly, but it’s complicated Phone with screen off, speaker only: 2W (guessing here) Handheld FM radio: less than 1W
If you look at your computer’s CPU usage while watching video, it’s mostly idle. So most of the power consumption is the screen’s backlight.
Assuming worst-case coal power, releasing 0.4kg of carbon per kWh, and a large TV, and let’s say 10% overhead for the server’s energy cost, that’s 0.13kg of carbon per hour. So don’t worry about it.
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
I’m a bit short on time, but I think “streaming” needs to be broken down into categories of scale. Streaming video from your home Plex server (shout-out to !homelab@lemmy.ml) is a lot different than Netflix’s video delivery system.
The latter intentionally stores the same content in multiple geographies, then with caches at local data centers, and sometimes even caches within your ISP’s network. All of this to distribute the load of millions of users, who can just as easily be in Florida as they might be in Oregon.
Whereas a home server has just one copy of the content, and since it might not always be streaming a video to you, can save power by spinning down drives or other optimizations. It is simply not possible to describe “streaming” when such radically different delivery mechanisms can all plausible be considered as streaming.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I’d say just as you can run your own server cooler (turn it off when not needed), Netflix servers are going to wind down during low demand and run lower power. But while you’re picturing you last laptop as a server vs a data center, try to picture every household out there running their own “server” the same way. Some are watching, some aren’t. I think OP’s question is more appropriate, comparing streaming to broadcast rather than streaming vs local storage. Besides, how’d you get that data? You transported physical media or downloaded it from a server.