84 FUTURE SHOCK Streaming Sustainability
The streaming video ecosystem is less green than we all suppose. And it’s going to get worse very quickly POWER STRUGGLE
ever underestimate the bandwidth of a person driving a van full of magnetic tape.” This is what one of Mike
Hazas’s college professors told him years ago; a kind of digital Zen koan that points out how tortuous the path is towards optimum sustainability. Hazas is a lecturer at Lancaster University’s Computing and Communications department. After getting an electrical engineering degree in the US, he won a fellowship from the National Science Foundation and went to Cambridge University to earn a PhD in mobile computing. Once at Lancaster, he added a degree in sociology into the mix, and became interested in how technology affects human life and the impact of energy on climate change. “It’s always worth asking ourselves if digital really is a more sustainable way of going forward or are we leading ourselves into a trap,” Hazas queries. “With the new technology comes new challenges.”
ELECTRIC CITY Facebook’s 27,000-square-
metre data centre in Lulea is powered by hydro electricity
We watch things in more places at more times and on more screens than ever before. Yet we turn the lights out before leaving a room to try and save electricity, when the energy our 24/7 digital connectivity consumes is skyrocketing.
Connectivity itself has altered our behaviour in how we consume video. Research has measured the traditional viewing spike that happens around prime time, but now there is a second much bigger peak at night as people head to bed.
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