Video streaming: how to reduce your carbon footprint

And you, streaming, how do you consume it? Watching movies on Netflix? By looping your playlist? Today, it is part of our online behavior and seems to have become even more integrated into our lives since the pandemic, a major prescriber of confined activities. But first, what is behind this Anglicism? To sum up, streaming consists of watching live videos online, which ranges from media libraries (such as INA in France) to specialized platforms (YouTube) via video on demand (VoD) like Netflix or videos integrated into social networks (Facebook, etc.). An increasingly bandwidth-intensive mode of internet consumption, this measure of a line’s ability to transfer an increasing amount of information over the same wire or WiFi network.

But beyond the necessary technology and the hopes placed by some in the deployment of fiber or that of 5G, which could in turn create a “highway effect” for online data, energy consumption and resulting greenhouse gases are increasingly the subject of questions at best and virulent criticism at worst. At a time when sobriety has become an imperative of our daily lives, what about streaming? A study conducted by researchers at the University of Würzburg (Germany) is coming today to bring us additional elements and, above all, to show us how we can