From One Edge to the Other

Abstract

Audio and video streaming and on-demand services have dramatically changed how, and how much, media is consumed. Streaming generally allows a much larger selection of content, and arguably greater convenience. Gaming is the latest medium to place delivery of content into the cloud, via services such as Google Stadia and NVIDIA GeForce NOW. Just as with video streaming, this new ease comes with a hidden cost from the infrastructure used to deliver it, including the hardware cost, engineering cost and the energy to power the data centres and communications networks. Although gaming is currently only 7% of global network demand, with more than 95% of that being made up of downloading content, the possibility of streamed games could rapidly change this network footprint. In turn, this affects the yearly growth of energy impact from IT services. We explore possible futures where growth of these services continues, and we illustrate the implications a decade from now with three possible future scenarios for shifts of gaming practices. Our analyses show that game streaming will cause significant increases in the energy and carbon footprint of games. CCS CONCEPTS • Networks → Network measurement; • Social and professional topics → Sustainability.

Using behavioural data to assess the environmental impact of electricity consumption of alternate television service distribution platforms

“…Research has been conducted on understanding and quantifying residential electricity use, including that associated with home entertainment equipment (Drysdale et al, 2015;Stankovic et al, 2016;Yohanis, 2012) (Sekar et al, 2016) (Sekar et al, 2019) and (Marsden et al, 2020). However, such studies do not account for electricity use beyond the home to deliver the entertainment services provided.…”