Comment by belval

Comment by belval 13 hours ago

3 replies

Netflix spending 240Wh for 1h of content just does not pass the smell test for me.

Today I can have ~8 people streaming from my Jellyfin instance which is a server that consumes about 35W, measured at the wall. That's ~5Wh per hour of content from me not even trying.

conradev 10 hours ago

They claim that streaming over WiFi to a single mobile device is 37W:

  Because phones are extremely energy efficient, data transmission accounts for nearly all the electricity consumption when streaming through 4G, especially at higher resolutions (Scenario D). Streaming an hour-long SD video through a phone on WiFi (Scenario C) uses just 0.037 kWh – 170 times less than the estimate from the Shift Project.
They might be folding in wider internet energy usage?

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/carbon-footprint-net...

vitus 7 hours ago

It's way more lopsided than your example would suggest.

My understanding is that Netflix can stream 100 Gbps from a 100W server footprint (slide 17 of [0]). Even if you assume every stream is 4k and uses 25 Mbps, that's still thousands of streams. I would guess that the bulk of the power consumption from streaming video is probably from the end-user devices -- a backbone router might consume a couple of kilowatts of power, but it's also moving terabits of traffic.

[0] https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf

ac29 7 hours ago

The 240W number is end to end, including the power usage of a TV. Its also the high end of the estimate of 120-240W