Shipping to streaming: is this shift green?

Abstract

Streaming movies over the Internet has become increasingly popular in recent years as an alternative to mailing DVDs to a customer. In this paper we investigate the environmental- and energy-related impacts of these two methods of movie content delivery. We compare the total energy consumed and the carbon footprint impact of these two delivery methods and find that the non-energy optimized streaming of a movie through the Internet consumes approximately 78% of the energy needed to ship a movie, but has a carbon footprint that is approximately 100% higher. However, by taking advantage of recently proposed "greening of IT" techniques in the research literature for the serving and transmission of the movie, we find that the energy consumption and carbon footprint of streaming can be reduced to approximately 30% and 65% respectively of that of shipping. We also consider how this tradeoff may change in the future.