alt Hacker NewsNetflix spending 240Wh for 1h of content just does not pass the smell test for me.
Today I can have ~8 people streaming from my Jellyfin instance which is a server that consumes about 35W, measured at the wall. That's ~5Wh per hour of content from me not even trying.
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It's way more lopsided than your example would suggest.
My understanding is that Netflix can stream 100 Gbps from a 100W server footprint (slide 17 of [0]). Even if you assume every stream is 4k and uses 25 Mbps, that's still thousands of streams. I would guess that the bulk of the power consumption from streaming video is probably from the end-user devices -- a backbone router might consume a couple of kilowatts of power, but it's also moving terabits of traffic.
[0] https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf
The 240W number is end to end, including the power usage of a TV. Its also the high end of the estimate of 120-240W
They claim that streaming over WiFi to a single mobile device is 37W:
They might be folding in wider internet energy usage?https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/carbon-footprint-net...