Me (Guste Papaurelyte), Simon Mazurel and Tatiana Remy are students from Sciences Po Paris, Reims Campus. We are second year students, currently working on our Digital Culture project on environmental issues related to the consumption of streaming services.
During this investigation, our aim is to explore the two-fold energy costs of online streaming services: creating the IT infrastructures and the costs of using it. According to a report by Deutsche Welle (4), a German news broadcaster, the latter consumes at least 10 p.p. more electricity compared to all the production of equipment and technology combined.
In the specific cases of Netflix and Spotify, we will explore in greater depth what contributes to the energy costs of the infrastructures of the two streaming services, such as creation of movies or series, advertisement, storage on the server, etc. Moreover, it would be interesting to explore the costs and technology of data transmission, and observe the physical expansion of the mobile communication network (electrical transmission efficiency).
If possible, we will conduct interviews with the professionals from the field of online streaming. However, we acknowledge that our proposal to contribute to our research may be declined due to privacy policies of the companies.
Secondly, we aim at exploring individual use habits and compare them with collective data. Concerning the former, the psychological factors behind the increase in the use of online streaming services is to be explored. From personal experiences, we have noticed that marketing strategies of Spotify makes people feel “more connected” with other users, by allowing them to create or follow playlists made by others, see what kinds of music your friends are listening to, or discover new artists thanks to “individually” crafted playlists for each user. On the other hand, some mechanisms, such as the auto-play function on Netflix, lets videos start automatically, making the information even easier to consume. This contributes to the practice commonly known as binge-watching.
On the other hand, we want to gather statistical data from a group of online streaming service users by conducting a survey. By doing so, we expect to explore the differences in the use of streaming services by factors such as age, but also observe if the users have a strong sense of their consumption volumes.
After collecting such data, we want to compare and see if we can find general consumption patterns between the individual users.
Therefore, we have decided to relate, on the Internet, the creation our own “mock-startup”, as previously mentioned. Indeed, we thought that it would be interesting, not only to look at what streaming services do wrong regarding the environmental issues, but also to look at what could be done to overcome the negative consequences. Therefore, the “green” streaming service and original productions it offers would aim at cutting down on energy costs as much as possible. However, we acknowledge that given our technical and technological knowledge it will be difficult to imagine how to actually “make the streaming green”. Thus, we are going to base ourselves on the pre-existing initiatives, such as Ecosia, which uses advertising money to plant trees. Having drawn inspiration from this alternative Internet search engine, our “green” streaming service would support non-profit Reforestation organizations, by donating large part of its profit to plant trees.
Lastly, after having explored the field in greater depth, both from the professional and individual sides, our objective is to propose an “environment-friendly” streaming service, which would incorporate both video and music-streaming.
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