Lets move to hand cranked vinyl. That would reduce it better than compact discs. This article smells of PR work by Music and Movie industries.
This is junk science, plain and simple. Streaming media, taking youtube just as an example hardly consumes 1% of the energy resources. This is more junk science.
Taking youtube as an example, their server farm burns about as much juice as two driers — one server burns as much electricity as a 100watt lightbulb. Taking this into account, lets look at how many videos are hosted and for how many people. Approximately 1,000,000,000 hits per DAY, over 2,000,000 videos. Now, lets boil this down to a compact disc or DVD, imagine the plastic (that is enough to wrap around the world 172 TIMES. And they're not indestructible — you see, people fire up their computer's DVD buners and make a backup or store them on cloud drives — still burning the SAME energy (if not more) to access these digital copies and they STILL had to harvest the plastic to make them and the computer hardware and energy to copy the data.
Again, this article is simply bad math and junk science.
Doesn't the carbon footprint depend on the source of the electricity? Does this take into account projected change from fossil fuels to solar, wind and water?
I'm a Google employee and am incredibly skeptical about this. We at Google are the only people in the world who know how much power our servers use or even how many we have (and it is a VERY closely guarded secret) so "Bach"'s numbers are likely no more than speculation. Combine that with an incentive to write something dramatic and you have a biased author with little information.
This is not to say people shouldn't be thinking about the issues presented by the energy use of server farms, but putting numbers on it like this is deceptive and wrong.
This is a pretty misleading write-up that fails to make a comparison between streaming technology and physical discs using only selected data. Comparing overall server farm stats to the cost of a single CD is short on correlation and long on simpleton logic, it's Fox news/Washington Post style 'journalism'. The author extrapolated and fabricated this article presumably just to serve as link-bait, certainly not as any kind of valid sharing of information.
Potentially, every link in the streaming media chain could be powered by renewable energy. Producing plastic discs and transporting them can't ever claim that.
Couldn't every link in the streaming media chain be powered by renewable energy? Making something out of plastic and transporting it can't claim that.
Radio. Radio uses energy. And that CD? They're just talking about the energy to MAKE it. It also takes energy to PLAY it.
Why are we even bothering measuring. None of these services would dream of sending uncompressed audio over the internet. Compression will take file size down by a factor of 10 (at least) which means all of the energy numbers derived from storage to transmission will be drastically reduced.
1 pteabyte preloaded drive with limited user access is a terrible idea. It sounds like the worst DRM ever. Please never do that.
Interesting, but I reckon this report might be a complete mess. I ran the calculations myself, based on their own figures and it looks like Internet delivery is 1,500 times more efficient than CD, not 27 times. Looks like they've confused minutes and seconds… oops!
People are starting to catch on…oh goody.
We don't use no steenkin' streaming.
Yeah but the energy needed to stream a song is dropping every 18 months because….
TEch gets more efficient every 18 months.
That same 1 petabyte hard drive also means Apple doesn't need as many hard drives in its servers which means less energy.
Cpus get more efficient because they do more work every 18 months without requiring more energy to run. That means fewer servers are needed to store songs on.
Bandwidth also gets more efficient every 18 months or so as we put more data down the pipe for the same energy cost.
So I think the study has an agenda. It is a good idea to understand that streaming isn't energy free. And a good idea to work on being more efficient by using caches. But let's not pretend this is a crisis.
Plus the parties involved will want to be more energy efficient. IT drops their costs.
And the cost on the client end to play a song only gets more efficient as well.
Anyway Itunes caches stuff already from the cloud. I don't even think you can stream exactly. It will invisibly keep songs on your phone until you need the space.
Also what this study is saying is that if you stream an entire cd 27 times that will equal the cost of making the cd.
That is even before you would play the cd. This study says nothing about the cost to play the cd 27 times and how efficient that is.
What a bizarre article. This guy doesn't actually know what the energy consumption of YouTube is now, much less what all media streaming will look like in fifteen years, and even less, what kid of equipment it will run on.
The collective minds of the ten biggest bleeding-edge tech companies in the world couldn't tell you that.