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Streaming Carbon Footprint

Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media

Streaming media is calculated to contribute a surprising 1% of global greenhouse gases, because most regions of the world obtain electricity from fossil fuels to power their data centers, networks, and devices. Streaming large files in large quantities, then, ethically implicates spectators in the warming of the planet. Bad news but we have some solutions!

Our research addresses the high and rising electricity consumption of  information and communication technologies (ICT), which consume as much as 7% of global electricity (Andrae 2020). Given that globally about 79% of electricity comes from fossil fuels, this means that ICT is responsible for 3.3% to 3.8% of global greenhouse gases (Belkhir and Elmeligi 2018, Cisco 2020b, Bordage 2019).

Streaming media  video on demand (e.g. Netflix, Crave), porn, YouTube, games, video conferencing, etc. contributes more than any other sector to this increase (Cisco 2020). People are streaming video at higher volumes and higher definition, and media and telecom corporations cheerfully encourage us to do so for entertainment and relief. Meanwhile, what we might call streaming impact denial plays into the notion that online media are virtual and do not impact the environment.

Unchecked, the carbon emissions resulting from ICT could exceed 14% of the 2016-level worldwide GHGE by 2040 (Belkhir & Elmeligi 2018, The Shift Project 2019). It is urgent to immediately reduce that figure, and the rising share of streaming media, through education and policy changes.

Our Research Findings

Our research project, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Knowledge Synthesis grant program, Living within the Earths Carrying Capacity," is complete. Please read the and download the PDF of the full report. It's a gripping mystery story set in the labyrinthine world of ICT engineering! Includes recommendations for consumers, telecoms, governments, and more.

ICT engineers have strong agreement about the electricity consumption of streaming video. Their findings confirm The Shift Project's estimate that streaming video is responsible for over 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions and growing fast.

The team

, 間眅埶AV School for the Contemporary Arts

, 間眅埶AV School of Engineering Science | Principal Investigator of the

, postdoctoral fellow, 間眅埶AV School for the Contemporary Arts

, PhD student, 間眅埶AV School of Engineering Science

Our group is on it!

We:

  • Critically assess engineering research on the environmental impact of ICT and streaming media, identify the most reliable results, and develop streaming media energy usage and carbon footprint calculator
  • Measure the electricity consumption involved in streaming media through case studies in British Columbia, and produce tools to accurately calculate its carbon footprint
  • Inform policymakers of the most promising policies and practices at governmental, institutional, and individual levels
  • Adhere to an open, reproducible science philosophy
  • Advocate alternatives to HD streaming, on fronts including carbon taxes for streaming services; simple alternatives like watching television and borrowing DVDs; and low-bandwidth streaming media
  • Teach media makers how to make small-file videos, with and tips
  • Share the beauties of appropriate technology through the
     
Laura U. Marks, Joey Malbon, and Faune Ybarra (left to right) at the closing event for SFMF 2022.

Small File Media Festival

The Small File Media Festival, featuring movies under 5 megabytes each, shows that great cinema doesnt have to mean great big files! Every year we receive scores of submissions from around the world, with ingenious creative solutions including animation, GIFs, low frame rates, datamoshing, executable files, obsolete technologies, and creative compression.

For more info and to keep up with all Small File Media Festival events and activities, please visit .

The is:

  • Sophia Biedka independent filmmaker
  • Kim Cleroux filmmaker and 間眅埶AV undergrad
  • Mena El Shazly multimedia artist and 間眅埶AV grad student
  • Joey Malbon media artist, musician, and activist
  • Laura U. Marks festival founder and 間眅埶AV professor
  • Radek Przedpeski Dublin-based scholar and artist
  • Faune Ybarra visual artist and SCA alumnus

CALL FOR WORK!

The Small File Media Festival is calling for work for their 2024 edition, with a deadline of June 15, 2024. Here's the call:

Media artists and eco-activist friends, give us a HIGH FIVE! Its the Small File Media Festivals fifth anniversary! Since 2020, weve been raising awareness about the environmental impact of streaming media. We challenge media makers to intervene in the 4K dystopia of bandwidth imperialism by creating original small-file movies of any length, proving once again that small files are THE sustainable cinematic avant-garde. If youve made it, you can submit it as long as its no more than 1.44MB per minute. More .

Past Festivals

Fourth Annual Small File Media Festival
October 20 21, 2023
The Cinematheque 1131 Howe Street, Vancouver

Small File Media Festival 2022
August 8 14, 2022 | Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema, Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre & SCA Media Lab (GCA Room 2345)
間眅埶AV Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

More HERE ~

Small File Media Festival 2021
August 10 20, 2021 | Online 

More HERE ~

Small File Media Festival 2020
August 10 20, 2020 | Online

More HERE ~

Carbon footprint of online teaching

This year, PhD student , with Marks, is working with 間眅埶AV's IT department to analyze the carbon footprint of online teaching. Check back here for updates about this project!

Events

Workshop at Pacific AIDS Network on best practices for organizations
Thursday, May 27, 2021 | 10:00 11:00 AM (PST)
Watch the video archive below ~

Streaming carbon footprint publications, talks, and media appearances

Our research is partially funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Councils program

Publications

  • 2022/3 Dawn Walker and Yani Kong, Reimagining Networks: Speculative Thinking for Low-Carbon Research Networks, Low-Carbon Research Methods, Ed. Pasek, Anne, London, UK: Goldsmiths College, Forthcoming.
  • 2022 Stephen Makonin, Laura U. Marks, Radek Przedpeski, Ramy El Mallah, Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva, A Holistic End-To-End Model to Calculate the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media, LIMITS 22. .
  • 2022 Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpeski, The Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: Problems, Calculations, Solutions, in Film and TV Production in the Era of Accelerated Climate Change, ed. Pietari K瓣瓣p瓣 and Hunter Vaughan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming).
  • 2022 Laura U. Marks, Large-File Streaming: An Unsustainable Pleasure, in What Film Is Good For, ed. Julian Hanich and Martin Rossouw (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming)
  • 2021 Laura U. Marks, A Survey of ICT Engineering Research Confirms Streaming Medias Carbon Footprint, Media + Environment. .
  • 2021 Laura U. Marks, Stephen Makonin, Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva, and Radek Przedpeski. Final report, Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media, SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis grant. 58 pages.
  • 2021 Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpeski, Bandwidth Imperialism and Small-File Media, in Post-45, special issue on New Filmic Geographies ed. Suzanne Enzerink. .
  • 2021 Yani Kong, The Digital Turn: Keeping Art Accessible in a Time of Crisis, Galleries West, December 2021. .
  • 2020 Laura U. Marks, Joseph Clark, Jason Livingston, Denise Oleksijczuk, Lucas Hilderbrand, Streaming Medias Environmental Impact, Media + Environment. Read HERE.
  • 2020 Laura U. Marks, Small-File Movies: Saving the planet, one pixel at a time, Millennium Film Journal 71/72 (Spring/Fall): 94-101.
  • 2020 Laura U. Marks, Streaming video, a surprising link between pandemic and climate crisis, Journal of Visual Culture and Harun Farocki Institut special issue on Covid-19. .
  • 2020 Laura U. Marks, Lets Deal with the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media, Afterimage 47:2, 46-52. .
  • 2020 Yani Kong, Tiny movies at the end of the world, 間眅埶AV School for the Contemporary Arts. Read HERE.
  • 2020 Radek Przedpeski, The environmental cost of binge-watching, Science Gallery, Dublin. .

Panels, roundtables, symposia, and talks

  • 2022 Azadeh Emadi, Joseph Malbon, Laura U. Marks, and Radek Przedpeski, Bending the possible (one pixel at a time): Small-file ecomedia for the Anthropocene, pre-recorded panel, ISEA 2022. .
  • 2022 Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpeski, Small-File as Ahuman Life.  Sustainable Experimental Ecomedia for the Anthropocene, plenary talk at Life Infinite: Immanence, Inflection, Indeterminacy, fifth Deleuze and Guattari Studies in India conference. November 13. By videoconference.
  • 2022 Yani Kong, Examining the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media in Online Teaching and Learning, Pacific Institute of Climate Science, University of Victoria, Video Conference, February 2022. 
  • 2021 Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpeski, A Contribution to the Critique of the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media. Earths Carrying Capacity as a Regime of Capital in the Postdigital Age. Talk on the panel Capital, Nature, Infrastructure at the conference Many Regimes of Capital in the Postdigital Age, University of Warsaw. October 20. By videoconference.
  • 2021 Yani Kong (chair), Laura U. Marks, Radek Przedpeski, and H璽n Ph廕《, roundtable, Immaterial Material: The Carbon Footprint of Online Teaching and Learning, UAAC, October 22. By videoconference.
  • 2021 Laura U. Marks and Stephen Makonin, "Let's Get Together with a Small Carbon Footprint," talk for Pacific AIDS Network on best practices for organizations. May 27. By videoconference. .
  • 2021 Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpeski, Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: A Transdisciplinary Laboratory for New Media Informatics. New Materialist Informatics 2021. March 24. By videoconference.
  • 2021 Laura U. Marks, Streaming media populate the ether and heat the planet, talk on the panel Expanded Environments II, Society for Cinema and Media Studies. March 21. By videoconference.
  • 2021 Yani Kong, Pushing Against the Substitution Effect: Best Practices for Carbon Neutral Streaming in Remote Teaching and Learning, Burnaby Festival of Learning, Vancouver, BC, April 2021.
  • 2020 Laura U. Marks, Joseph Clark, Jason Livingston, and Lucas Hilderbrand, Lets Tackle the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media. Roundtable. Society for Cinema and Media Studies. April 4. Videoconference organized by SCMS Environmental Special Interest Group.

Laura U. Marks lectures

  • 2022 A talk on the panel On Greening Film Festivals organized by Ger Zielinski. Society for Cinema Studies, April 3, 2022. By videoconference. Download the presentation PDF HERE.
  • 2022 A talk on the panel "Compression politics and aesthetics: Mitigating the carbon footprint of streaming media organized by Marek Jancovic and Judith Keilbach. NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies). Bucharest, June 22, 2022. By videoconference. Download the presentation PDF HERE.
  • 2021 Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media, in the Sustainability Dialogue series organized by Kevin Lee. Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. November 30. By videoconference.
  • 2021 The Small File Media Festival, talk to the Animation; Experiment collective, hosted by New Media Society, Tehran. April 29. By videoconference.
  • 2021 Streaming Media, Online Conferences, and the Jevons Paradox, keynote talk, British Association for American Studies, April 6. By videoconference.
  • 2020 Seeing in the dark, keynote talk at Dark Eden, Sixth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science, and Culture. November 6. By videoconference.
  • 2020 The Small File Media Festival, keynote talk at NxtMedia 2020, Trondheim, Norway. By videoconference.

Interviews and media

  • 2022 Laura U. Marks, Ask an Online Media Expert: Whats the Carbon Footprint of the Internet?, told to Alex Tesar, The Walrus, June. Page 66
  • 2022 Laura U. Marks, interview on carbon impact of streaming media with Carolina de Ryk, Daybreak North, CBC radio, Prince Rupert, BC. June 17
  • 2022 Laura U. Marks, Is Our Netflix Obsession Harming the Planet? This Is the Environmental Impact of Streaming, podcast interview with Stephanie Osmanski, Brightly.eco. Listen HERE.
  • 2021 Laura U. Marks, Media Genealogies and Haptic Geographies, interview in Alex Estoricks series The Uncanny Valley, Flash Art, October 12. .
  • 2021 Laura U. Marks, interview with Michael Hedges on the carbon footprint of streaming media, British Association for American Studies 2021 Annual Conference. June 30. .
  • 2021 Cinema, touch, and the climate movement with Laura U. Marks, interview on Roz Skillens podcast Catch Yerself On. March. .
  • 2020 Laura U. Marks and Stephen Makonin, Streaming video is overheating the planet. Op-ed, The Vancouver Sun. August 15. .
  • 2020 Laura U. Marks, interview with CBCs Gloria Macarenko on the carbon impact of streaming media and the Small File Media Festival. August 10.

Research projects

2022 Yani Kong, Laura U. Marks, and Stefan Smulovitz, Examining the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media in Online Teaching and Learning, Living Lab Initiative, 間眅埶AV Sustainability, Vancouver, BC, January 2022.

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