85 FUTURE SHOCK Streaming Sustainability
THE HOURLY DATA DEMAND OF CATEGORISED APPS
IS DIGITAL REALLY A MORE SUSTAINABLEWAY OF GOING FORWARD OR AREWE LEADINGOURSELVES INTOA TRAP? When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said his company’s biggest competitor was sleep, he meant it. Our instincts may tell us that something as weightless and invisible as video data could hardly be a major energy consumer, but the amount of energy required by the digital content world is big – and growing. “If you count everything – consumer devices, computers in offices, all the networks, as well as the data centres – you’re looking at 10% of global electricity use,” says Hazas. “Of that, about 3% of global energy use goes to video streaming.” Those numbers may be surprising, but the more unnerving statistic is the rate video consumption is growing. Presently, Hazas puts the rate of growth in video at 34% per year. Moreover, the rate of mobile traffic is growing at 50% per year. When computing what the power consumption of video will be in the next decade, it’s important to note that much of the world has yet to be adequately connected digitally. The streaming revolution has just started to reach sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia and South America. Mobile is likely to be the way forward for these populations, with 4G and 5G networks making it easy to boost the numbers of mobile subscribers in these regions at scale. The really dismaying thing is that mobile actually uses more energy than terrestrial-based networks. “If you can stream over a broadband or fibre network, that’s actually better. If you’re streaming over 4G, you consume roughly two and a half to three times more energy in total,” explains Hazas. The arrival of 5G is not likely to solve the energy consumption problem. It’s expected that, although 5G is more efficient, the widespread adoption of 5G and the new content opportunities it brings, will render any energy savings through efficiency irrelevant.
Watching (345) Social networking (331)
Communication (347) Listening (321)
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This graph, from a 2017 Lancaster University study, shows traffic aggregates for different categories like video streaming and social networking. It is drawn from a data sample of 398 Android devices in the UK and Ireland. There are two visible peaks in
the ‘watching’ category (video streaming): one at traditional prime time and another later on as people head to bed and take their phones and tablets with them (this ‘bedtime peak’ was also confirmed in subsequent studies run by the university).
Graph above redrawn from fig. 5b in “Demand Around The Clock: Time Use and Data Demand of Mobile Devices in Everyday Life. In proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems” by Kelly Widdicks, Oliver Bates, Mike Hazas, Adrian Friday, and Alastair R. Beresford
The energy consumed by digital video is also going to be multiplied by bigger, better and brighter video formats, and the devices they are viewed on. A 4K TV set – by virtue of its size if nothing else – is going to be a bigger power hog than an HDTV, but when we get to HDR, power consumption increases noticeably, since quality HDR TV’s must be substantially brighter than even 4K screens. “Watching on a mobile phone, 90% of the viewing session’s energy spent in distribution, is in the cloud. Whereas, when watching something on an HD projector or 4K TV, most of that energy is spent at the consumer device. That trade
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