87 FUTURE SHOCK Streaming Sustainability
period of time. This means a potential for rapid – global – growth, and the power consumption that goes with it. WHAT DO WE DO? So how do we in the streaming industry reduce our power consumption? Hazas believes that changing your travel habits is still one of the sure-fire ways to do this, but calculating energy consumption isn’t always straightforward. “Teleconferencing is a clear win. It’s better than flying or even taking the train. It’s even better than your taxi journey to the train station. But in other areas, it’s less clear,” he says. Hazas notes the research done in the ‘life-cycle assessment’ field, which studies the environmental impacts of a product through every stage of its existence, from extraction of raw materials to manufacture and distribution to disposal. “One paper a few years ago looked at the distribution of large triple-A classified video games through Blu-ray disc versus digital distribution over the internet. They found that, for large games, it was actually better to distribute on Blu-ray. Of course, that comes with a caveat: you may be downloading almost the entire game again every time you get a new update. But for the initial distribution, there are arguments for more traditional media,” he explains. Some of the digital giants responsible for a good chunk of online video activity have been aggressive in powering their servers using entirely renewable energy. So if the big platforms are switching to renewable energy anyway, is there even a problem? Well, we all know people tend to run into trouble when they assume there’s an unlimited amount of any resource – even
COOL TOOLS The climate in Lulea, Sweden allows Facebook to use outside air to cool its tens of thousands of servers on campus
if that resource is sunlight and heat from inside the planet. Hazas believes that provisioning renewable and green power should go hand in hand with a company wanting to build a big infrastructure project. “It comes down to a policy question for governments. The way I think about it is if they’re going to build a data centre, they should provision a renewable energy source at the same time as a new development that might not have otherwise happened, it starts to make things even.
It’s a good way to go forward,” says Hazas. “But what usually happens is the company might make some green provision, but then during peak times might buy back excess power from the national grid, which during the cold winter months essentially requires coal-fired power plants to be spun up.” Hazas points out that it’s also better in the long term for these big platforms to build their own green infrastructure, because it will be eventually less expensive than the alternatives. “Companies need to have an awareness of the energy and environmental costs of their service, and then make consumers aware that this is something they keep in mind when deploying services,” notes Hazas. “In addition to saying ‘we’re a green company, we’re keeping an eye on how much energy we consume and where it comes from when we deploy video’, you could have different versions of a video available, which would display the environmental impact according to different resolutions or length. It’s something that could boost a company’s image, especially if online video continues to grow as quickly as it has been.”
ONE PAPER FOUND THAT, FOR LARGE VIDEO GAMES, IT WAS BETTER TO DISTRIBUTE ON BLU-RAY
feedzinesocial feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook