Streaming against the Environment: Digital Infrastructures, Video Compression, and the Environmental Footprint of Video Streaming

Abstract

Building on an infrastructural approach, this chapter investigates the environmental impact of video streaming. It clarifies some of the less obvious relationships between media infrastructures, video compression standards, and electronics supply chains and demonstrates how their interactions unfold material effects on the environment. Complicating recent critical research on data centers, we posit that existing models for calculating the ecological footprint of video streaming cannot capture its full extent and advocate for an interdisciplinary approach to data, computation, and infrastructure. This approach informs our argument that the development of new compression standards redistributes environmental responsibility in a way that benefits streaming providers and data centers at the expense of end users and hardware manufacturers.