Streaming is greener than shiny discs

So a DVD is this disc, right, and you have it, you have it in your hands and then you have it in your DVD player. Streaming video uses your TV or your computer, it uses your internet connection, it uses any number of other computers between you and Netflix or whoever you’re streaming from. And then that company has a lot of computers too. All on now, all working now, all needing support staff and a lot of electricity. Yet streaming is more ecological than shiny discs.

Americans can save enough power to run 200,000 households a year by streaming videos with efficient devices instead of driving to the store to buy or rent DVDs.

Researchers studied five different ways of viewing movies and, using a systematic method called life cycle analysis, estimated the energy used and carbon dioxide emissions produced for each. They determined that video streaming can be more energy efficient and emit less carbon dioxide than the use of DVDs, depending on the DVD viewing method.

DVD vs Video Streaming: Which Wastes More Energy? Northwestern University, University of California, Berkley (2 June 2014)

That’s the academic world’s version of a come-on title: it’s saying that watching films is wasting energy resources, regardless of which method you use. But beyond the guilt trip, there is analysis and you’ve already guessed why streaming wins:

“End-user devices are responsible for the majority of energy use with both video streaming and DVD viewing,” says Eric Masanet, associate professor of mechanical engineering and of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University.

“Much of the energy savings estimated in shifting to video streaming comes from shifting end-user devices to more energy-efficient alternatives—in other words, away from old DVD players,” he says.

Read the full piece and learn where to read even more.

Much more efficient in 1965

Can’t resist one more British Pathé film – in part because this Business Efficiency Exhibition was in 1965, the year I was born. And partly because some of the whizzy new equipment looks a bit Professor Branestawm-like to me. But mostly because it tells me things are relative. Success and failure are relative.

You’ll hear the (still. terribly. formal. but. a. bit. more. chipper!) presenter say that the Post Office has to cope with 30 million letters per day. Right now we imagine the Royal Mail is dying –  or at least I have imagined it since I’m email-obsessed – but the latest figures available show it’s carting around 46 million letters per day.

(‘Latest’ means 2010. You’d think there would be far more recent data given the recent sell-off of Royal Mail shares but seemingly, not so much. Read Letters Delivered 1920-2010, a PDF from the Postal Heritage website’s statistics page. I did not know there was such a thing until I wanted to tell you. Note that the PDF lists annual figures, not daily. British Pathé or its source clearly just took the annual figure for 1965 and divided by 365 because if you do that, you get a total of 30,684,931.51 letters per day. The 2010 equivalent is 45,613,698.63.)

We now return to your regularly-scheduled video from the Business Efficiency Exhibition 1965:

Efficiency is Their Business

More from British Pathé (much more) here.