Towards Estimating the Carbon Footprint of Video Streaming

Video streaming dominates the Internet traffic. Assessing the carbon footprint of video streaming has received recently a significant attention with a number of models proposed to associate a CO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> cost to one hour of streaming. In this work, we compare the modeling assumptions and computation methods used by five recent works to inform the debate. Indeed, initial results can be at odds, with up to one order of magnitude difference in the estimates. Our contributions are: (i) we relate the difference in the results primarily to the perimeter of the study, e.g. including production cost or not, (ii) we question some of the modeling assumptions made using a real deployment of a streaming server in a controlled environment with up to 2000 clients and (iii) we propose a technique to reconcile the models and obtain a CO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> estimate in between 60 and $\mathbf{1 4 0}$ grams when considering the average worldwide carbon intensity of electricity.