Still watching DVDs? You're a planet-killing carbon hog!

Yes, I am going to ditch my stuff and stream online with all the costs and impracticalities that involves all in order to save the planet from . . . . what exactly?

Byte me.

I'm kind of confused by an article like this. Yes physical media is on the decline with cloud storage and online streaming increasing but the author doesn't seem to have a very good grip on interpreting real world issues. I live in America where we continue to have 'Digital Divide' issues created mostly by a handful of corporations working in collusion to maximize their own profit at the expense of a stagnant network infrastructure. So for most of us consumers depending on how much you pay and where you live you may or may not be able to sometimes watch anything online with some or very little 'buffering'. And here's a typical example -- for something like 'Downton Abbey', at one time we were able to binge watch it on Netflix but then after Amazon sent a few pallet loads of money and some hookers to the BBC management, the show was suddenly only available as rental discs because Amazon retained exclusive rights to stream it.

So basically we are a long, long, long way from anyone being able to just sit down and watch what they want, we have a mess of convoluted services mixed with a various ways to access content, along with a small but influential anti-government conservative and libertarian sector of the population who view regulation as a problem and not a cure. This is just what's going on here in America, I don't know how much better or worse things are elsewhere.

This adds in my driving to the shop to buy the disc?

This smells like bullshit to me. This factors in my trip to the shop to buy the disc? I wouldn't make a special trip just to buy a DVD. The DVDs I own were either bought mail order, or bought while I was doing other shopping.

Also, once I own it that is the end of its CO2 footprint regardless of how many more times it gets watched. Some of my daughter's films have been watched tens or even hundreds of times.

ok... I'll go sit in a dark cave

with no 'leccy, no carbon footprint, etc. Will the alleged boffins do the same? How about the greens?

I'm getting tired of hearing "what you should do is...." when the people saying this don't do it or even come close.

Sure,,,, I'll ditch my DVD collection and only stream online from now on....

Will they pay my broadband bill though?

It's bad enough the BBC thinks it's fine to start dropping channels off-the-air and make them online only, I really don't need anyone else doing that.

They make some HUGE assumptions here

That people are making special trips for each DVD they watch, as opposed to picking them up at the Redbox conveniently located in/outside a place they'd be visiting anyway, and as opposed to getting Netflix to mail them to do, and as opposed to owning them.

The true number is nowhere near 200,000 household equivalents. If you want to attack CO2, you need to make big moves, not worry about stuff that's lost in the noise of the noise like DVDs. If the US switched trucks, busses and trains from diesel to natural gas, that would be a massive change. Not to mention the benefit to world stability of the Middle East playing a reduced role in the political calculations of the US.

I'm somewhat skeptical of global warming, but I still support switching the bulk transportation industry in the US to natural gas for the latter reason (and yeah, someone will whine about fracking, but the problems it may create are minor compared to the negative political consequences of the US having an oil dominant industry)

If there wasn't DRM...

We'd all be using pay-download services which would be _way_ more energy efficient than current streaming offers and wouldn't have the disadvantages. So far buying DVDs and Blurays is the only feasible way to get a DRM-free copy of a movie for your own personal use.

"once you count in driving to the store"

So going to the cinema is a crime against the planet, too?

Worth checking the source

The Register's link was broken, but after a few web searches I found the article.

The little picture in the Register's article compares 3.28 hours of streaming with 17.28 hours of DVD (50% mail delivered, 50% consumer delivered). That 50/50 split was a guess because the authors did not have any better numbers. The full sized oranges to oranges picture with separate columns for mail and consumer delivery is here.

By the study's numbers, streaming is only more environmentally friendly when consumer transport is included. Mail delivery is about as environmentally (un)friendly as streaming. If you use consumer delivery, you can divide the big pink rectangle if you watch a rental more than once, or if you rent more than one film per journey (I think the study assumes pick up and drop off in the same round trip journey of 17km). You can also squash or remove the pink box if you went to town for other reasons and bought more than one DVD while you were there. The idea of buying a boxed set of six for a TV series has been conveniently forgotten.

The next biggest box is consumer equipment power. Old DVD players use the same amount of power when idle and when playing, and these make up a significant fraction of the 2011 US population. If I buy a second hand DVD player and leave it on continuously, then for every Joule it uses, 0.99 Joules are not used for central heating (the house is too hot for about 4 days per year). The same would be true of a streaming box, but in the study, streaming boxes use about half the energy of DVD players.

This leaves streaming with a great big green box for network transport energy that make it tower over the tiny grey and yellow boxes. Much of the big green box would be there anyway for an internet connection whether you use streaming or not. (The invisible brown sliver for mail delivery would still be there because the post lady delivers letters too.) The only box that survives is the grey box for the embodied energy (manufacturing costs) of the consumer devices. This is about the same for streaming and DVD.

The real conclusion should be: don't waste time worrying about the tiny speck of energy used by video. Concentrate of the things that matter: transport, central heating/cooling, and washing. Little things like switching to an efficient fridge and fluorescent lighting save you money, but even if everybody does those little things, then end result is a little change in the total amount of power used.

Carbon

Aren't DVDs and their packaging predominantly made of plastic, which is made from oil, which would otherwise be burned into the air in an engine?

So our shelves of DVDs are technically carbon sequestration. The government should be paying us for the service!

This isn't a like for like comparison?

"HD" streaming via netflix et al is no where near as pleasant to watch (& listen to) as a plain old DVD (and BluRay knocks it out of the water). OK they may set the resolution to 1080i and call it "HD", but with an awful, AWFUL bitrate it still looks better on DVD at 576p with a higher bitrate.

I digress...

This article compares apples and oranges... You could just as easily argue that DVDs are better for the environment than going to the cinema once you factor in the staff travelling to work, cost of keeping the popcorn warm, the cinema usually being mostly empty, having to get to the cinema etc etc, but they are different beasts.

I'll happily stream a film that is mostly storyline, or catch up with iPlayer, but for a action / blockbuster, I want detail and sound quality that I can't get at the moment when streaming - until the streaming services let me download the full 4.7GB DVD, you can't compare them.

All well and fine, but...

Every streaming service I've tried do NOT provide subtitling for the feature, and some have no intetion to ever provide subtitling, hiding behind clauses such as "the licence holder prevents.."

I am deaf. I need subtitling on my movies. DVD's provide that. Streaming doesn't.

I'll stick with DVD's.