I’m a hard copy kind of guy. When Amazon announced that it was putting a content warning for people who want to stream Blazing Saddles, I bought a BluRay copy. When Neil Young pulled his songs off of Spotify in his tiff with Joe Rogan, I had a CD and I could play Cinnamon Girl as many times as I wanted to, secure in the knowledge that Neil wasn’t getting another penny from me.
It turns out there’s another reason, besides free expression, to embrace hard copies of your books, music, and movies.
In 2010, director and producer James Cameron embraced the streaming of movies, saying that getting away from DVD and Blu-Ray discs would be good for the environment.
It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices.
Wondering what consumes more energy, playing a disc on your home player or streaming the same entertainment, I turned to Microsoft’s AI. The nice thing about AI, imperfect as it will always be, like any human invention, is that it can indeed make answering rather complicated questions a fairly trivial pursuit. I decided to let Microsoft’s artificial brains do some back of the envelope calculations and the following is what it produced. To make things easier, I didn’t bother with how much electricity the monitor or tv set consumes, since that’s highly dependent on how big the screen is and is the same regardless of the source. The following is simply the amount of energy it takes to get the data to that screen, just what it takes to run the disc player.
It takes10 to 15 watts of energy to play a typical DVD. Blu-Ray playback is a bit more energy intensive, so they take about 18 watts to watch.
The AI wouldn’t give me a figure in watts for streaming a 2 hour movie, but I was able to find out that depending on the type of connection, how dense the data stream is, and a few other variables, the energy costs to transmit a movie is about 0.08kWh, which works out to about 40 watts for a two hour movie.
However, that’s not all of the cost. Just as the DVD or Blu-Ray disc needs to be made, a streamed movie must be stored on a server which itself has energy costs.
While the energy costs of streaming have gone down, they are still significant.
Contrary to what Mr. Cameron predicted 14 years ago, the “power it takes to run the computers” is actually more than it takes to play a DVD or Blu-Ray disc on your home player.
And the beautiful thing about having the physical medium is you can put it on your server, self host via Plex or some other app and have the Best/Worst of other worlds. The physical medium in you possession and the ability to watch or listen to your selection at the house or stream worldwide wherever you have a connection. You can burn energy however you choose.
Regarding Neil Young I understand his appeal but follow the philosophy that a Southern Man don’t need him around anyhow.
So a rich liberal was wrong when preaching to “the poors”? Shocking!
Good article - I suspect MANY of these green “prophecies” are complete crap.