Indeed: a conventional channel is the same signal for millions of users, video on demand is a single signal for a single user. Which necessarily requires (a lot?) More IT resources (therefore energy) when we want to "serve" millions of users ...
The number of Netflix subscribers is over 50 million worldwide.
Same remark for ADSL TV ... which must be, even if it is not personalized, more energy-consuming than traditional cable distribution ...
So here I would like to find together some figures like:
- Bandwidth used by Netflix
- How many kWh of electricity per MB transferred over the internet (average)?
- Netflix (or even youtube) energy consumption / hours of programs viewed
- After converting to equivalent CO2 will then be fairly easy (if we know the country of origin of the servers)
- User side: the use of a pc (especially desktop) is also more energy-consuming than a TV that we watched before all in family ... but that was before!
ps: a study from a few years ago (2009 already) had calculated that a simple search on Google was the equivalent of heating a cup of coffee! So imagine what a 3Go HD movie to download can represent? I found the subject https://www.econologie.com/forums/cout-energ ... t6884.html it's actually 2 searches = 1 kettle ...
According to the work of this scientist, two queries on Google would generate 14 grams of carbon emission, almost the footprint of an electric kettle (15 g)