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Just because an economy of scale is real, doesn't mean the work being done is meaningful or necessary. I'm arguing that the last couple of decades have seen a lot of work being created in order to necessitate traditional 'economy of scale' business models — aka a factory with an owner — when other ways of doing things may have been better in terms of global energy efficiency. E.g. the transcoding/compression only needs to happen once for each use case, the whole movie could be buffered rather than maintaining a server connection for the entire runtime. There are examples outside of streaming too ofc, and I'm not saying cloud computing has no use cases — but nobody really believes that the Netflix model is based on sound fundamentals, do they

Facts. There's a reason why virtue signaling companies are a thing in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I'm not an expert in this field ofc, but I suspect simply serving a file would be way less energy intensive. There are less centralized alternatives too such as torrent streaming, which may or may not be more efficient. It would be nice to exist in an economy where we could explore these questions!

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I don't think so. Afaik, factors such as subtitles, different languages, different client hardware, mean that transcoding everything on the fly isn't quite as crazy as you'd first think. I imagine there's some sort of DRM stuff too, which is going to take its toll.

But I stand by what I said about the business needing the energy cost in order to justify its existence. It's not just a question of revenue/expenditure — e.g. constantly needing to expand capacity makes a compelling story for investors. Capitalist efficiency, innit

Facts. There's a reason why virtue signaling companies are a thing in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I read somewhere that they transcode everything on the fly, which they insist is necessary. The real point though, imo, is that cloud services have to be incredibly energy intensive in order to justify their existence to begin with.