It is said streaming, especially video, takes plenty electricity, can be bad for the environment. So I wonder, how does watching Kim Possible on Mickey Channel compare to watching it on Mickey Plus? Similarly, and maybe even better of a comparison, how does listening to something like 623.7 FWGR Radio on FM compare to listening to the station’s online stream?
I’m a bit short on time, but I think “streaming” needs to be broken down into categories of scale. Streaming video from your home Plex server (shout-out to !homelab@lemmy.ml) is a lot different than Netflix’s video delivery system.
The latter intentionally stores the same content in multiple geographies, then with caches at local data centers, and sometimes even caches within your ISP’s network. All of this to distribute the load of millions of users, who can just as easily be in Florida as they might be in Oregon. The duplication and redundancy means a lot of power draw, well more than just a few disks spinning up.
Whereas a home server has just one copy of the content, and since it might not always be streaming a video to you, can save power by spinning down drives or other optimizations. It is simply not possible to describe “streaming” when such radically different delivery mechanisms can all plausible be considered as streaming.
I’d say just as you can run your own server cooler (turn it off when not needed), Netflix servers are going to wind down during low demand and run lower power. But while you’re picturing you last laptop as a server vs a data center, try to picture every household out there running their own “server” the same way. Some are watching, some aren’t. I think OP’s question is more appropriate, comparing streaming to broadcast rather than streaming vs local storage. Besides, how’d you get that data? You transported physical media or downloaded it from a server.