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The Energy Saved By Ditching DVDs Could Power 200,000 Homes
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "The environmental benefits of streaming a movie (or downloading it) rather than purchasing a DVD are staggering, according to a new U.S. government study by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If all DVDs purchased in 2011 were streamed instead, the energy savings would have been enough to meet the electricity demands of roughly 200,000 households. It would have cut roughly 2 billion kilograms of carbon emissions. According to the study, published in Environmental Research Letters, even when you take into account cloud storage, data servers, the streaming device, streaming uses much less energy than purchasing a DVD. If, like me, you're thinking, 'who buys DVDs anymore, anyways?', the answer is 'a lot of people.'" The linked paper is all there, too — not just an abstract and a paywall.
And if you're unable to read the study online, you can order a paper copy.
Did they also calculate how much energy would be saved if we would not waste processor power on DRM decoding?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
>> If all DVDs purchased in 2011 were streamed instead, the energy savings would have been enough to meet the electricity demands of roughly 200,000 households.
Or, if you're like my family, the energy "saved" from spinning up DVDs on two different TVs has now gone into a more powerful wireless router (to support better streaming), bigger TVs (bought with money saved from cancelling cable), a digital antenna booster (so we can watch HD network TV without cable), and personal tablets that none my three kids had in 2011.
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When I buy a DVD, I own that DVD. That is why I buy DVDs. I don't want some DRM server somewhere suddenly saying that I cannot stream a movie I purchased.
Now if streaming allowed me to purchase and keep a copy free of DRM, then I'd be interested.
But so long as there is DRM, I'll continue buying DVDs.
I still buy physical DVDs - primarily because they are passively archival and don't depend on me a) having connectivity or b) having my server nearby. I view programming at some locations (like my cottage) where it's easier to bring a few DVDs than it is to copy a bunch of data onto a hard disk and then connect a computer to the television.
I also wonder if the energy consumption considers the issues of ramped-up Internet infrastructure and server capacity required to store, back up and stream the content. This isn't free and isn't emission-neutral. High-def (e.g. Blu-Ray) content is even moreso whereas the cost of a Blu-Ray disc versus DVD is actually almost trivial. Once you own the Blu-Ray player, you're done except for the marginal two or three dollar cost for the higher definition media.
That pirating movies has actually been helping the environment the whole time? I for one am glad keep up with my civic duty for a better tomorrow...
As someone who has spent the last decade virtualizing anything with a power supply that wasn't critical, you would be astounded as to the savings from yes, *gasp* running apps in the 'cloud'.
It just doesn't mean what YOU think it means.
The cloud isn't just a hosted application that moves seamlessly around a cluster. It can be a head on a cluster, that hosts an application and save thousands of KW a year and you the end user wouldn't know the difference. It's a direct analog to the idea of ditching DVDs. Move the application where the backing resources can be shared, and managed remotely and you will save carbon.
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If you read the article in detail, the energy cost for a DVD rented or purchased by mail is pretty much identical to that of one streamed (figure 4.)
The purported energy cost difference between DVD and streaming is entirely due to the fact that they assume you drive to the store to buy or rent the DVD. (In fact, there is actually a tiny bit more carbon emitted if you stream instead of rent or buy by mail, if you look at the right image on figure 4).
I assume if you buy or rent from a store you're going to visit anyway, this differnce vanishes
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So all of the 'environmental benefits' boil down to the assumptions they make about those purchases.
Perhaps it's just me, but I would lean more towards people already being at a store/mall for another purpose and picking up the dvd as an impulse buy. Non-impulse buys of dvd would seem to more logically take place over the internet.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
1. no control over purchase as it can be revoked at any time for any reason.
2. even the best internet streams hitch, lag, and drop frames.
3. complexity: the majority of nontechnical people understand the concept of placing a disk in a tray and hitting play.
4. value proposition. I won't pay $20 for a movie I can't really own.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Don't start all this "can't tell the difference" crap. Until you can get internet lags and stutters completely eliminated we'll be able to tell the difference.
All "clouds" must be over the internet. The whole point of "the cloud" is that it is located remotely, on someone else's hardware, managed by someone else's IT staff. Elsewise, it's nothing more than the same data center you had a decade ago.
It means, as the poster alluded to FREE ENERGY. Though, as he says - it's not - because then we would call him a quack. He's just implying that 100-102% efficiency is possible when you synchronize the frequency of your input power source to the harmonic frequency of your target power consumption or device.
If you need a car analogy, it's like filling your gasoline tank in your car and marking down the mileage, and then checking to see how many miles you have gone when you fill up the next time. This is where the quantum effect also plays a role, because by simply never filling the tank all the way up, you'll get an infinite number of miles per gallon. Example: Fill tank at 12,400miles, partial fill 4 times, then complete fill of 8.26 gallons at 13,175 miles = (13,175-12,400)/8.26 = 93.8 miles per gallon. Once you fill up the tank and mark the mileage down, though, you've cut off your "harmonics" and you'll get a finite value. That's why it's not really "free energy" because to get free energy or over unity you would never be able fill up the car all the way. The longer you can go without completely filling the tank and triggering the measurement, the closer you are to matching the engine/gasoline fill harmonics. I've achieved well over 300mpg in my truck this way, but I've also got special magnets on my fuel line and installed an "open flow" regulator on the air intake, so there are other advantages which helped me achieve this which are unrelated to the harmonics.
The same thing applies to power - whether it be lightbulbs or networking equipment or freely spinning bicycle wheels, though in an entirely different way.
If my ideas are intriguing to you, I would be happy to subscribe you to my newsletter.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Most clouds I've worked with to date have been corporate clouds. No internet involved. Networks, yes; but no internet. Lag was never a problem for me in those environments.
All "clouds" must be over the internet. The whole point of "the cloud" is that it is located remotely, on someone else's hardware, managed by someone else's IT staff. Elsewise, it's nothing more than the same data center you had a decade ago.
Not necessarily true. One aspect of the cloud is being able to rapidly expand capacity or relocate workloads based on application needs. "located remotely, on someone else's hardware, managed by someone else's IT staff" is more like a definition of out-sourcing. Cloud can be on my hardware, managed by my staff, be migrated to or augmented by remote capacity during peak times or special circumstances.
"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.
To me, "the cloud" is just a buzz word which corresponds roughly to the thin client rage of yesteryear.
Cloud computing is definitely cool and useful for many tasks. I've migrated all my home based server things to an EC2 instance and quite pleased with the results. I however would NEVER advocate ditching my home based General Purpose computer in exchange for a thin client and a cloud backed CPU.
It just sets a bad precedent for one. I immediately think of bad things like the GP computer going byebye and everyone having to rent time from a cloud compute CPU to do anything useful. Not to mention the surveillance implications of having all your stuff only accessible by remote (meaning others can access it by remote as well.)
Cloud computing has a place, but it is NOT a replacement for the home based General Purpose computer.
I worked in a shop where circuit breakers were beginning to blow owing to the increasing number of physical boxes running at under 15% capacity.
Virtualization was obviously the first step, since we'd have more physical rackspace, and less idle hardware pulling power.
But the problem with virtualization is that if a host box breaks down or one of the virtual guests suddenly gets hungrier, you have to manually reconfigure stuff.
Cloud software takes care of a lot of that stuff automatically.
Actual KW saved by not running directly on metal, and squeezing every possible resource out of a highly efficient and redundant server.
On the other hand, many "cloud" services are actually grid services that run on many, redundant, small servers, in contrast to the blade center HP and IBM tries to shove down your throat. One example is GMail and the assorted google services. So, while I understand your point about virtualization, cloud and virtualization are two very different and very distinct things.
It means asset depreciation is much lower, so server churn is much lower (less carbon, less waste less garbage)
It depends how you measure it. In a pure cpu-power-per-watt, 1U servers are way cheaper than an equivalent blade solution, easier to service, and will run cooler. They do take more space, but asset depreciation on a 50K blade cage vs 30K of 1U servers is bigger in the blades.
every watt is consumed rather than dissipated as heat
Well, its not, and this is one of the biggest fallacies of virtualization. It wildly varies according to the workload and your configuration. For small workloads, you may even spend more in hardware to provide proper virtualization than you had to pay for a metal solution. You do gain flexibility, and yes, when well done, you may take more advantage of your hardware, but this is not a novel concept. When possible, solutions like linux containers, solaris zones and freebsd jails allows at least some level of flexibility with a smaller execution footprint.
And regarding usage... well, most cpu's even implement an instruction that internally halts the cpu if not in use. Cpu consumption varies according to the workload, and most of the specs mention max consumption, not average consumption. It may even happen that your beefier setup actually spends more power per vm than single dedicated servers.
It means common parts for all servers which leads to less manufacturing waste.
Yes, but is it cheaper? As an example, almost all industrial processes wastes copious amounts of water, when often more sofisticated and reusable replacements are available. But water is cheaper. Its a bit like saying "this aluminium package is 20% smaller, so we can stop using cardboard packaging because it generates less waste". I would like to see proper metrics on that, not sure if it is that obvious.
And streaming is stupid... Downloading movies would make a lot more sense than DVDs, but streaming is ridiculous...
Most people would want to watch movies around the same time, so think of the crippling bandwidth requirements all at once. And what about those who can't get fast connections at home for whatever reason - streaming would be impractical, but downloading would usually still be quicker than a mail order dvd.
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Looks like some special interests are trying to strike another blow against people actually owning the movies that they buy. Lets list some other benefits: You don't get to watch the disc again, or lend it to a friend. And if you do watch it again on-line, you can completely ignore any costs involved (because that's what the research did). You're not distracted by the extra content included on DVDs. The lower quality streaming video is perfectly fine for you. You're completely freed from the "right of first sale' and will never have to concern yourself with selling or trading old DVDs that you have. And those nice people at your ISP who have started capping your service and who will charge outrageous overages if you happen to exceed your monthly quota will gladly forgive your overage if you explain how you were downloading or streaming for the sake of the planet (wouldn't you, AT&T?)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
1. 17 km to drive and purchase DVD? 50% of the trip is apportioned to the DVD transport to account for multiple purchases and errands per trip in the base-case? I doubt people are driving 10 miles just to purchase a DVD, or as only 50% of the reason to take the trip in the first place.
2. Average disc lifetime 5 years? I still have 'The Matrix' that I got for free with my first DVD player back in 1999. None of my DVDs seem to really have a 'lifetime' that I can tell.