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Offer subject to change. Receive Netflix Standard with ads while you maintain a qualifying line in good standing. Netflix account, plan availability & compatible device required. Alternative discount toward different Netflix streaming plans may apply. Not redeemable or refundable for cash; cannot be exchanged for Netflix gift subscriptions. Cancel Netflix anytime. Netflix Terms of Use apply: www.netflix.com/termsofuse. 1 offer per T-Mobile account; for existing Netflix members it may take 1-2 bill cycles during which time you will continue to be charged separately for any existing Netflix account. If you link an existing Netflix account to this offer, terminating the qualifying line will not automatically cancel your Netflix membership, and Netflix will automatically resume charging your existing payment method that they have on file. Like all plans, features may change or be discontinued at any time; see T-Mobile Terms and Conditions at T-Mobile.com for details.
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Log into My.T-mobile, select Account, and then select Manage add-ons. On the Manage data and add-ons page, add Netflix in the Services section. T-Mobile pays Netflix directly for you. For customers with an existing Netflix account, it may take one or two Netflix billing cycles for your billing to transfer to T-Mobile.
The streamer has cracked down on password sharing, offering a cheaper ad-supported plan for cost-conscious viewers. Added restrictions on viewers who were borrowing Netflix accounts got people to buy their own subscriptions, helping the company increase net income to $938 million in the fourth quarter, compared to $55 million a year ago, while revenue rose 12.5% to $8.8 billion.
Meanwhile, Wall Street started to turn on legacy media companies including Disney, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which had sacrificed traditional television and box office revenue to fuel their streaming ambitions. Stock market pressure encouraged those businesses to rein in their spending on direct-to-consumer operations.
Two years ago, the future of Netflix was murkier as it navigated a correction in the streaming industry. At the start of the pandemic, streamers including Netflix saw massive growth as people sheltered at home and looked for ways to entertain themselves. But eventually the subscriber growth slowed down, with Netflix reporting a decline in customers in the first half of 2022. The hiccup was startling to investors, considering the sums the company was spending on content, and the stock tumbled.
In January, Netflix announced its film chief, Scott Stuber, was leaving in mid-March to start his own media business. His role will be filled by Dan Lin, CEO of production company Rideback, starting in April.
Even before millions were confined to their homes by a global pandemic, improvements in internet connections and service offerings had led to an exponential increase in the use of streaming video around the world. With few options left for entertainment, streaming services are taking off. In this commentary, we examine the carbon footprint of these services.
Streaming services are associated with energy use and carbon emissions from devices, network infrastructure and data centres. Yet, contrary to a slew of recent misleading media coverage, the climate impacts of streaming video remain relatively modest, particularly compared to other activities and sectors.
Drawing on our analysis and other credible sources, we expose the flawed assumptions in one widely reported estimate of the emissions from watching 30 minutes of Netflix. These exaggerate the actual climate impact by up 90 times.
The relatively low climate impact of streaming video today is thanks to rapid improvements in the energy efficiency of data centres, networks and devices. But slowing efficiency gains, rebound effects and new demands from emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, raise increasing concerns about the overall environmental impacts of the sector over the coming decades.
Update 11/12/2020: The energy intensity figures for data centres and data transmission networks were updated to reflect more recent data and research. As a result, the central IEA estimate for one hour of streaming video in 2019 is now 36gCO2, down from 82gCO2 in the original analysis published in February 2020. The updated charts and comparisons also include the corrected values published by The Shift Project in June 2020, as well as other recent estimates quoted by the media.
Looking at electricity consumption alone, the original Shift Project figures imply that one hour of Netflix consumes 6.1 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity. This is enough to drive a Tesla Model S more than 30km, power an LED lightbulb constantly for a month, or boil a kettle once a day for nearly three months. The corrected figures imply that one hour of Netflix consumes 0.8 kWh.
With 167 million Netflix subscribers watching an average of two hours per day, the corrected Shift Project figures imply that Netflix streaming consumes around 94 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, which is 200 times larger than figures reported by Netflix (0.45TWh in 2019).
The assumptions behind the Shift Project analysis (largely based on a 2015 paper, whose assumptions have been significantly revised in 2019 and 2020) contain a series of flaws, which, taken together, seriously exaggerate the electricity consumed by streaming video.
This difference stemmed from a stated assumption of 3Mbps apparently being converted in error to 3 megabytes per second, MBps, with each byte equivalent to eight bits. The Shift Project corrected this error in their June 2020 update, but did not revise any of their other assumptions, discussed below.
The Shift Project analysis overestimates the energy intensity of data centres and content delivery networks (CDNs) that serve streaming video to consumers by around 35-fold, relative to figures derived from 2019 Netflix electricity consumption data and subscriber usage data.
My original February 2020 analysis showed that the Shift Project assumptions for data transmission energy intensity (0.15-0.88 kWh/GB) were much higher than more recent estimates (0.025-0.23kWh/GB). However, the latest research shows that these data-based intensity values (kWh/GB) are not appropriate for estimating the network energy use of high bitrate applications such as streaming video. Instead, experts advise using time-based energy intensity values (kWh per viewing hour). Therefore, my assumptions for data transmission energy use have been updated with time-based energy intensity values.
Taken together, my updated analysis suggests that streaming a Netflix video in 2019 typically consumed around 0.077 kWh of electricity per hour, some 80-times less than the original estimate by the Shift Project (6.1 kWh) and 10-times less than the corrected estimated (0.78 kWh), as shown in the chart, below left. The results are highly sensitive to the choice of viewing device, type of network connection and resolution, as shown in the chart, below right.
The IEA estimate is also substantially lower than other estimates quoted in the media, including 22-times lower than the Despacito claim (cited on Channel 4, the BBC, Fortune, and Al Jazeera, assuming a global average grid mix) and 11-times lower than the claim by Save On Energy that 80 million views of Birdbox emitted 66ktCO2 (cited in the New Yorker, Euronews, Forbes, Die Welt, and the Daily Mail). My estimate of 36gCO2 per hour is over 2100-times lower than Marks et al. (2020) who estimated that 35 hours of HD video emits 2.68tCO2, or 77kgCO2 per hour.
But as the chart above shows, this figure depends heavily on the generation mix of the country in question. In France, where around 90% of electricity comes from low-carbon sources, the emissions would be around 2gCO2e, equivalent to 10 metres of driving.
Using country average emission factors may still overestimate emissions, particularly from data centres. Technology firms operating large data centres are leaders in corporate procurement of clean energy, accounting for about half of renewable power purchase agreements in recent years.
The electricity mix is also rapidly decarbonising in many parts of the world. For instance, the emissions intensity of electricity in the UK fell by nearly 60% between 2008 and 2018. Compared to 2019 levels, global emissions intensity of electricity falls by around a quarter by 2030 in the IEA Stated Policies Scenario and by half in the Sustainable Development Scenario.
As well as changes that are invisible to the consumer, there are also obvious trends in the technology seen everyday. Devices are also becoming smaller and more efficient, for example, in shifts from CRT to LCD screens, and from personal computers to tablets and smartphones.
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