Carbon impact of video streaming
Furthermore, with the development and roll out of 5G mobile network equipment globally, and the potential this holds for low latency, high-quality connectivity, we may well expect to see a shift towards increased mobile network device consumption of video streaming. 5G has the potential to unlock a significant increase in mobile consumption, being able to provide faster streaming services over mobile networks. However, consumer households are still likely to have a home router, either a fixed line router or a 5G home broadband hub replacing a fixed line router (or possibly both), and therefore savings will not be driven by avoiding home router transmissions related energy use.
5.14 Predicting the future is difficult and has inherent uncertainty
It is inherently difficult to predict what the future may hold for video streaming going forward. Several key aspects of future development should at least be considered when discussing the future of video streaming. These include the uncertainty surrounding future behavioural patterns of consumption, what devices are used to stream video, the effect of 5G, and the difficulty in projecting modelled network energy. With the rapid nature of end-user device product lifecycles quickly changing due to product innovation, and dynamic consumer behaviour trends, it is hard to say how video streaming habits may change. Here are just a few conceivable scenarios. While the declining trend of televisions in homes demonstrated in the US may continue, we may see more of a shift towards viewing of video streaming on mobile devices. However, there is significant uncertainty surrounding these trends. Unknowns surrounding the future of product development make predicting consumer device use difficult. 5G may play a big role in the future of video streaming, with the roll out of 5G mobile network equipment increasing around the world. As mobile video traffic and mobile devices begin to overtake the growth of other data traffic and fixed devices, internet service providers may attempt to propose new mobile infrastructures and solutions for high performance video streaming services, providing high-quality, high-efficiency streaming (Vo et al., 2017). Should 5G unlock a vast potential of high-quality streaming capability, we may see a heightened shift towards video streaming content viewed on mobile network devices, and smaller more efficient devices, compared to traditional fixed network devices in the home. This may potentially lead to energy and carbonrelated savings associated with video streaming. However, a lot remains to be seen in the development of 5G – whether it will achieve the potential capability to deliver high-quality content and whether it may displace some of the use of fixed networks and home routers for video streaming.
Discussion
From a modelling of video streaming emissions and energy impact perspective, there is also significant difficulty in understanding how the future assessment of internet transmission-related energy per volume of data might change going forward. The modelling of network energy, that has been used in assessing the energy associated with the transmission component of video streaming, is reflective of a specific timeframe. Consequently, the network models must be continually updated going forward, in order to reflect the most recent time period that is being assessed. Simple extrapolations using the figures and approaches in this paper will have a significant amount of uncertainty associated with them, as they will not reflect the network characteristics of future scenarios. However, despite this uncertainty, we can at least expect that networks will only get more energy efficient over time. Historically, the electricity intensity of network data transmission has halved roughly every two years since 2000 (Aslan et al., 2018). As also demonstrated by reporting of energy intensity by network operators – for example, see data reported by Telefónica and Cogent in section 2.6.2 (Figure 8 and Figure 9). The future may also hold potential rebound effects, resulting from the increased ease of access of low, fixed monthly cost video streaming services. As video streaming has become more accessible and cheaper for consumers, consumers are viewing more and more video streaming content. As video streaming consumption increases in the future there may well be a rebound effect of increased energy use and carbon impact, potentially to the point where efficiency gains in network transmission and end-user devices are outweighed by the increased consumption of streamed video content. This highlights the importance of the continued uptake of renewable electricity to power transmission networks, so that increased network energy consumption does not translate directly to increased emissions.
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