The steep, real costs of streaming TV

There is an environmental impact with all streaming services that you may not be aware of. Watching one hour of, say, Disney+ or Netflix, requires energy for that transmission. Those little wires you attach to your TV are fed a stream of electricity with the TV signal. Electricity needs to be produced, handled and streamed to your home.

So, with that one hour of steaming you have to calculate an equivalent of driving your normal car about 300 yards. Sounds like very little usage until you multiply it up, say four-plus hours a day, 365 days a year = 438,000 yards or 248 miles. If you’re doing 20 mpg, that’s the same equivalent of pollution from 12.44 gallons of gas. Just for that one TV.

In the USA, streaming accounts for 26% of all TV watching in 122,400,000 homes — or 31,824,000 homes that stream. Amount of CO2 emissions from those streamers per year? The emission from an equivalent of 395,890,560 gallon of gas, or 7,775,290,598 pounds of CO2.

A Boeing 737 produces/emits 198 pounds of CO2 per hour at 480 mph. So, the streaming TV CO2 emission for the USA is the equivalent of 39,269,144 hours of flying at cruise, which is a distance of 18,849,189,328 miles for a 737-passenger jet.

Just to help you understand this number, pre-COVID, the steaming CO2 emission was about 2.5% of all commercial flights in the USA. Once you add in out-of-office and schoolwork with video conferencing in 2020 and 2021, internet streaming and connectivity to homes across the nation that probably pushed to 10% of CO2 emissions of the total aviation industry and the equivalent of 800 million gallons of gas.

Some good news needs to be factored in here. Modern electronics and server technology is, in 2022 compared to 2018, twice as efficient already — and getting better every month.

What needs to be watched, however, is that those 90,576,000 homes currently not streaming will, eventually, all hook up and stream TV content.

And let’s not forget that schools, once kids are used to tablets and connectivity, are not about to go backwards either. An argument can be made that even with the minor per hour pollution of streaming TV users are polluting less than driving to a movie show, but all the studies conclude that once households get streaming service, their hours of consumption goes up — way up. In addition to which, the above calculations do not account for multiple TV sets in use at the same time.

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now resides in New Mexico.