How Streaming Is Cleaning Up Its Act
Typical weekend: you’re curled up on the couch, phone is away, and you’re diving into the latest show everyone’s talking about. Your biggest worry is whether your favorite character will make it. The last thing on your mind is the carbon footprint of your viewing party.
It turns out, getting that show to your screen is a surprisingly energy-intensive process. We’re talking about massive data centers that store and send the files, which need constant cooling. Then there’s the production itself: fleets of trucks, generators humming on location, flights for the cast and crew, and entire sets built from scratch only to be torn down. It all adds up to a hefty environmental tab.
Thank God the industry is finally getting its act together. Faced with some extra glaring numbers and a growing demand from viewers for greener practices, a quiet revolution is happening behind the scenes. They’re figuring out how to make the magic of television without such a massive cost to the planet.
A huge part of the problem starts long before you see the opening credits. Film and TV sets have traditionally been wasteful places. But that’s changing, fast. Take Sky, for example. They made a big splash a few years ago by announcing they were going net-zero. But they didn’t just buy a bunch of carbon offsets to pat themselves on the back. They got their hands dirty. On their show Brassic, they did some really clever stuff. They swapped out noisy, fume-belching diesel generators for silent, powerful battery packs. They used electric vehicles to zip around. They even created a “studio-on-a-truck” to cut down on the number of vehicles needed. It’s a perfect case of using common sense and new tech to solve an old problem.
Then there’s the UK’s secret weapon: Albert. This thing started at the BBC and has now become the industry’s go-to carbon calculator. Imagine a budget tracker, but for carbon. It forces production teams to log everything—every flight, every kilowatt of electricity, every scrap of material. Suddenly, it becomes obvious where the waste is. Do we really need to fly that actor in first class? Can we build this set so we can take it apart and use it again? Albert gives producers the hard data to make smarter, greener choices from the very beginning.
And the movement is everywhere if you look for it. The crew on Apple’s See made a huge effort to recycle or compost most of their waste. Even the Downton Abbey films got in on the action, banning plastic water bottles and reusing sets. It turns out, being green often saves a ton of money, too - The Amazing Spider-Man 2 saved hundreds of thousands by going eco-friendly.
Of course, it doesn’t matter how green your set is if the digital pipeline is a gas-guzzler. This is where the tech giants come in. Companies like Google and Amazon Web Services—the folks who host a lot of the content we stream - are in a race to make their data centers hyper-efficient.
They’re doing things like using artificial intelligence to manage cooling systems, which is a massive energy drain. They are also buying enough wind and solar power to cover their insane electricity needs. Some are even getting creative, like building data centers in colder places (Hei Norway) to use the outside air for free cooling or even dunking servers in special fluid to keep them from overheating.
Even the way video files are prepared is getting more efficient. New encoding tricks can cut the energy needed to store and stream a show by more than half. Some places are even using the waste heat from their servers to warm nearby buildings. Now that’s a neat trick.
What Can YOU Actually Do?
Don’t worry, no one’s asking you to cancel your subscriptions (save for Elon Musk but for entirely different reasons) and go live in the woods. But if you want to help, there are a few painless things you can do.
Chill on the 4K. Do you really need ultra-high definition for that background sitcom? Dropping down the video quality when it’s not essential, makes a real difference in energy use.
Download, don’t stream live. If you know you’re going to watch something, downloading it over Wi-Fi uses less energy than streaming it “live” each time, especially on mobile networks.
Be a choosy viewer. Instead of leaving a show on auto-play for hours, maybe pick what you want to watch beforehand. Less mindless viewing means less overall demand on the system.
One hour of streaming might seem harmless but multiply that by billions of viewing hours globally, and you’ve got an almost insatiable appetite for electricity to power servers, cool them, and transmit the data.
Streaming—and the broader entertainment world—is still in early days of sustainability. The momentum is real, though. The industry is moving from “green as marketing” to “green as essential infrastructure.”
We’ll see more carbon calculators (like Albert), stronger Scope 3 accountability, smarter encoding algorithms, and data centers built with sustainability in mind from day one. One provocative idea: what if streaming becomes the default delivery for all computing tasks (eliminating need for local installs)? Some see that as part of a cleaner future.
So next time you lose yourself in a gripping show, take a moment to picture the invisible changes behind it: solar-powered servers humming in cool climates, sets built with reused materials, generator-free shoots, and smarter algorithms slicing energy waste. The drama should stay on screen — not in the carbon footprint it took to get there.
Thank God the industry is finally getting its act together. Faced with some extra glaring numbers and a growing demand from viewers for greener practices, a quiet revolution is happening behind the scenes. They’re figuring out how to make the magic of television without such a massive cost to the planet.
A huge part of the problem starts long before you see the opening credits. Film and TV sets have traditionally been wasteful places. But that’s changing, fast. Take Sky, for example. They made a big splash a few years ago by announcing they were going net-zero. But they didn’t just buy a bunch of carbon offsets to pat themselves on the back. They got their hands dirty. On their show Brassic, they did some really clever stuff. They swapped out noisy, fume-belching diesel generators for silent, powerful battery packs. They used electric vehicles to zip around. They even created a “studio-on-a-truck” to cut down on the number of vehicles needed. It’s a perfect case of using common sense and new tech to solve an old problem.
Then there’s the UK’s secret weapon: Albert. This thing started at the BBC and has now become the industry’s go-to carbon calculator. Imagine a budget tracker, but for carbon. It forces production teams to log everything—every flight, every kilowatt of electricity, every scrap of material. Suddenly, it becomes obvious where the waste is. Do we really need to fly that actor in first class? Can we build this set so we can take it apart and use it again? Albert gives producers the hard data to make smarter, greener choices from the very beginning.
And the movement is everywhere if you look for it. The crew on Apple’s See made a huge effort to recycle or compost most of their waste. Even the Downton Abbey films got in on the action, banning plastic water bottles and reusing sets. It turns out, being green often saves a ton of money, too - The Amazing Spider-Man 2 saved hundreds of thousands by going eco-friendly.
Of course, it doesn’t matter how green your set is if the digital pipeline is a gas-guzzler. This is where the tech giants come in. Companies like Google and Amazon Web Services—the folks who host a lot of the content we stream - are in a race to make their data centers hyper-efficient.
They’re doing things like using artificial intelligence to manage cooling systems, which is a massive energy drain. They are also buying enough wind and solar power to cover their insane electricity needs. Some are even getting creative, like building data centers in colder places (Hei Norway) to use the outside air for free cooling or even dunking servers in special fluid to keep them from overheating.
Even the way video files are prepared is getting more efficient. New encoding tricks can cut the energy needed to store and stream a show by more than half. Some places are even using the waste heat from their servers to warm nearby buildings. Now that’s a neat trick.
What Can YOU Actually Do?
Don’t worry, no one’s asking you to cancel your subscriptions (save for Elon Musk but for entirely different reasons) and go live in the woods. But if you want to help, there are a few painless things you can do.
Chill on the 4K. Do you really need ultra-high definition for that background sitcom? Dropping down the video quality when it’s not essential, makes a real difference in energy use.
Download, don’t stream live. If you know you’re going to watch something, downloading it over Wi-Fi uses less energy than streaming it “live” each time, especially on mobile networks.
Be a choosy viewer. Instead of leaving a show on auto-play for hours, maybe pick what you want to watch beforehand. Less mindless viewing means less overall demand on the system.
One hour of streaming might seem harmless but multiply that by billions of viewing hours globally, and you’ve got an almost insatiable appetite for electricity to power servers, cool them, and transmit the data.
Streaming—and the broader entertainment world—is still in early days of sustainability. The momentum is real, though. The industry is moving from “green as marketing” to “green as essential infrastructure.”
We’ll see more carbon calculators (like Albert), stronger Scope 3 accountability, smarter encoding algorithms, and data centers built with sustainability in mind from day one. One provocative idea: what if streaming becomes the default delivery for all computing tasks (eliminating need for local installs)? Some see that as part of a cleaner future.
So next time you lose yourself in a gripping show, take a moment to picture the invisible changes behind it: solar-powered servers humming in cool climates, sets built with reused materials, generator-free shoots, and smarter algorithms slicing energy waste. The drama should stay on screen — not in the carbon footprint it took to get there.
