Streaming the Future of Sustainability

The rapid growth of digital video traffic presents both challenges and opportunities for sustainable content delivery. We argue that the shift towards on-demand streaming, exemplified by services like Netflix, provides a path to significantly reduce the carbon footprint and e-waste associated with traditional computing paradigms. By eliminating the need for local operating systems, enabling more efficient edge devices, and leveraging renewable-powered cloud infrastructure, streaming on-demand hardware and content can drive down energy use and embodied emissions. We analyze the key factors behind streaming's improved sustainability and chart a course for further optimization, envisioning a future where streaming is the default across all computing domains. This future will be enabled by a new class of streaming-optimized edge devices and continued innovation in areas like video coding, adaptive bitrate algorithms, and energy-efficient processing.