Netflix can now serve 100Gbit/s of video (so something like 12,500 individual 4K streams) with an appliance using 100 watts of power. That’s 8 milliwatts for each 4K stream.
Remember that number the next time someone tells you that watching a Netflix show is as bad as driving an SUV or some shit.
@duco @dalias I run a small fiber network and can confirm that in principle there’s very little marginal energy cost to traffic. Our peaks are in the 50–80 gigabits per second range and don’t really show up on router electricity usage graphs compared to the 10x smaller baseline.
That said, wireless is different. Also, much of the capacity is there specifically for video, so it’s not right to look at the marginal cost alone.
Marko Karppinen
Cassandrich
Duco