I guess the death of web search is finally hitting me, too, as I can't find anything that looks like a reliable source, but blog spam market research seems to claim anywhere from 60% to 90% of all web traffic is streaming video. Something to keep in mind for everyone who wants to blame JavaScript and advertising. With hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding, plus localized edge caching, this traffic is probably as efficient as it will ever get already, and the only way to cut energy usage would be to reverse the content explosion and consumer addiction.

Given current trends, that seems unlikely. If anything, with LLMs that can do both CGI and storycrafting, it will get even less efficient as content is generated rather than serving stored files.