Study shows Netflix has social media's largest carbon footprint

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Originally published at: Study shows Netflix has social media's largest carbon footprint | Boing Boing

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I can’t wait to post about this on Netflix

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I admit, calling Netflix “social media” is an unforced error. My question is how Netflix compares to Amazon, Disney+, AppleTV+, and so on. Oh, and how their carbon footprint compares to renting physical media.

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They also compared four different automobile manufacturers: Ford, GM, Honda, and Boeing.

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Still dwarfed by PoW cryptocurrencies, I’m sure. At least you get something of actual value for the carbon burn.

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I mean, where are they even getting the “social” part? Netflix is just a “media” company.

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A recent study by the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Those dang Hungarian’s are shaming us again.

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Or driving downtown to watch a film in an air-conditioned theater.

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Already said but :

NETFLIX IS NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA SITE

if it was where are all the posts?

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Posts

A new series on Netflix, starting February 30th

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As far as social networks go, the one with the largest carbon footprint is Homo sapiens

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Oh Boy, I remember that. Those were the days…

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Netflix and chill?

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Netflix would likely be worse:

Netflix is watched by 6 times more than YouTube, and multiplying by 6 equals (280.26 g—YouTube) to 1681.56 g CO2e. The same multiplication applies to the other applications.

Their calculations seem to be almost entirely based on total hours streamed per day. They don’t seem to do any individualized analysis of the services beyond number of users and hours streamed per day. All the carbon cost calculations were taken from other papers and not individualized to each site, they are general cost estimates for online video streaming, so the largest service has the most cost.

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Good Lord, the fact that they didn’t even divide the emissions by number of users to get a “per user” emission level means that this “study” is essentially meaningless. The new “social network” I just created has the lowest carbon footprint since it has zero users.

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/Donald Trump has entered the chat

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Is this a pro-Meta study or something?

This just seems fundamentally flawed in a purposeful way.

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In the Limitations section they say

The main concern of this study is that it did not critically review the formulas and methods the authors used but incorporated the results of each calculation.

So all of this is based on 4 other studies, making this a meta-study, with the conclusions is certainly feels like a pro-Meta-meta-study.

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The closest I can guess is their recommendation engine, which is the same sort of AI driven guessing at what you might like to watch based on what other people watched as all the algorithmic timelines and such on “real” social media sites. Just twitter recommendations are threads of a few ~240 character posts while Netflix recommendations are a minimum of a half hour, but more likely two hours or a series of 30min to one hour “posts” :slight_smile:

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How is netflix social media, i mean even youtube is a stretch, the days of people using it to blog, are long over now its more home made tv.

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