  Climate change challenges require a notable decrease in worldwide greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions across technology sectors. Digital technologies, especially
video streaming, accounting for most Internet traffic, make no exception. Video
streaming demand increases with remote working, multimedia communication
services (e.g., WhatsApp, Skype), video streaming content (e.g., YouTube,
Netflix), video resolution (4K/8K, 50 fps/60 fps), and multi-view video, making
energy consumption and environmental footprint critical. This survey
contributes to a better understanding of sustainable and efficient video
streaming technologies by providing insights into the state-of-the-art and
potential future directions for researchers, developers, and engineers, service
providers, hosting platforms, and consumers. We widen this survey's focus on
content provisioning and content consumption based on the observation that
continuously active network equipment underneath video streaming consumes
substantial energy independent of the transmitted data type. We propose a
taxonomy of factors that affect the energy consumption in video streaming, such
as encoding schemes, resource requirements, storage, content retrieval,
decoding, and display. We identify notable weaknesses in video streaming that
require further research for improved energy efficiency: (1) fixed bitrate
ladders in HTTP live streaming; (2) inefficient hardware utilization of
existing video players; (3) lack of comprehensive open energy measurement
dataset covering various device types and coding parameters for reproducible
research.
