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.
@karppinen You and they are not counting all the infrastructure in the middle to deliver it. It also doesn’t include all the power needed to encode the umpteen codecs to support all streamable devices. They still look like an AI startup training LLMs. This is like saying that an EV is 100% green and hooking it up to mains back to a coal fired power plant.
@eric these Open Connect appliances are deployed very close to the eyeballs, that’s the whole point. I don’t know how many views an average Netflix encode gets but it’s sure as shit more than mine, so can’t be a significant number of watt-hours per view
@karppinen I have run access networks, cable heads, wireless MTSOs through my entire career and know down to the milliwatt what it costs to deliver a bit sicne I paid the bill. This article is focused on what is already the least expensive device to operate and ignores the end-to-end delivery of a stream. The Verge just published an article with the Netflix person in charge of encoding and she said it was incredibly power intensive.
@eric I don’t doubt it’s intensive but I don’t also expect it to count on a per-view basis. They claim to have achieved a halving of bitrates with their encoding magic so that places an upper bound of how much it makes sense to spend on it.
Anyway, all of this is a rounding error compared to the energy intensity of your 55-inch TV. The beef I have with all the stories about the environmental impact of streaming is that the impact is almost exactly the same as with linear TV.
@karppinen streaming is exponentially more expensive than legacy broadcast TV. I implemented switched digital and vod in the cable industry back in 2003 and the increase in power required us to blow out our headends for HVAC and power to support it. Simulcast is inherently more expensive than legacy broadcast. And I agree, the edge infrastructure, ie TVs, AppleTVs, are a major impact that people forget to include in power consumption. Cable set top boxes with DVR were the worst.
@eric very on point. On the flip side, the cost of delivery in Unicast starts to become more evident to the book keepers at media corporations. Still haven't found out how to make it really profitable. And surprise... Transcoding on "legacy" broadcast HW is now much cheaper than using server based and cloud based solutions @karppinen
@karppinen I’m just tired of the tech industry using every little excuse to gaslight us that they re moving green when they keep sinking further down of more and more power consumption. Watch out if a data center is installed in your town. Expect your power bill to go up to help pay to feed it.
@karppinen @eric > The beef I have with all the stories about the environmental impact of streaming is
And if you change "beef" for "vegetables", you message is even more environmental friendly 
.
@eric @karppinen the power needed to encode the streams is IMHO negligible, if you take into account the number of people, Netflix serves. Decoding is also not an issue, as even old fashioned TV needs to be decoded and the video player platforms all have specialized circuits to help deconding the data.
@eric @karppinen one additional thought: I am curious how streaming providers fair against classic, linear TV. There, you have also significant infrastructure with their own power requirements.
@AUROnline @karppinen we did those studies I worked for one of the largest cable operators on the planet. Unicast/streaming boiled down is almost 2x to delivering legacy broadcast tv. We had VOD and SDV when Netflix was still mailing DVDs and we were already stressing about the infrastructure and power demands. Let’s just say the cable industry dropped the ball…
@eric @karppinen @dalias
I remember a few years ago I saw a study by carbon trust, who evaluated it from the Netflix servers over the network to your home including the TV/Laptop/….
They claimed that the European average emissions of an hour video streaming (56gCO2) is as much as driving a car 250m.
If you commute 10 km (6.2 miles) to work and 10 km back by car, you could have watched 80 hours of Netflix instead to cause the same emissions.
@eric @karppinen infrastructure consumption does not scale over bandwidth.
@karppinen That's true, but the actual externalized cost of streaming is the network route between Netflix and you, not their servers.
@dalias sure, that network route is *very* short on average for the open connect appliances, though.
@dalias @karppinen just look at the router at home. It maybe condumes 11,5 W base load and when you download 2 GB over 1 hour it increases to 11,6 W. So if you don't turn it off, the 11,5W are used anyway. The 2 GB caused maybe 0,1 W extra electricity. I don't think that it's much different in internet routers (except them having more throughput). The big factor with Netflix is your screen. A Projector causes more emissions than a TV > computer monitor > laptop > smartphone.
@duco @karppinen Those numbers do not sound at all accurate.
@dalias @karppinen I think I got those numbers more or less from a scientist that measured this values. But I took this screenshots from a study. It at least shows the dimensions.
@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.
@karppinen @duco Exactly. Streaming video is the whole reason all the capacity infrastructure is there.
@dalias @karppinen @duco hmm, right. I'm always impressed negatively when I see people loading youtube videos in the underground just to listen to music. Where did mp3 player apps go? Thats a bit insane.
@dalias @karppinen So the externalized cost of streaming is... internet access? If that's true, this doesn't seem like an interesting topic. No one's giving up internet access, or suggesting others should give it up.
@agocke @dalias @karppinen the point is maybe our internet accesses wouldnt need to be that gigantic if it wasnt for video? I mean, as a nerd I'm happy to have gigabit fiber to my home for my servers, but the reason I benefit for this, is actually video delivery...
@f4grx @agocke @dalias for fiber specifically, I don’t think the bandwidth matters much, the fixed power usage is going to be the pretty much the same. Note that the average Netflix 4K stream is only 8Mbps apparently, so it’s hard to find a commercial internet offering that’s too slow for it.
Again, wireless is different, and there video streaming causes capacity issues which are then dealt with by building more towers -> some of the fixed costs of wireless are directly attributable to video
@karppinen @agocke @dalias that is very right, thanks for the precision.
@karppinen That is genuinely astonishing.
@chamomile it does boggle the mind!
@karppinen How the **ck can they do that ?!
I want to do the same.
Did they just have some enormous cache?!
I mean they can't do that only with SSD. It's at least 5W just for the SSD and to match 100Gb/s you need at least a good network card, RAM and CPU.
@ache @karppinen Do the maths 100 Gb/s = 12.5 GB/s, PCIe links and memory speeds of a normal PC can both keep up with that. If your software stack isn't bloated, all it has to do is fetch content from disk, encrypt it, and then send it off to the network interface. If you can use hardware AES the encryption is no problem for a normal consumer CPU.
@NohatCoder @karppinen Yes. My point is 12GB/s isn't disk speed so they have to use so sort of trick here to reduce that.
@ache @karppinen Multiple disks. You get like 5 GB/s with a good NVMe disk, so 3 of those should theoretically do.
@ache @karppinen They also circumvent the numa architecture, because "too little bandwidth" and "too much overhead" for their usecase. Look for their eurobsdcon talks of the past years, where they thoroughly explain their designs (eurobsdcon has a yt channel with the collection of the talks)
@mapet @karppinen Thank you ! I will definitely do watch the confs.
@karppinen
Really impressive although I am not sure netflix was really a problem in the first place compared to the waste / cost of building terminals that are designed with rapid obsolescence in mind.
@jfparis sure, although big screen TVs are arguably worse even though they’re kept way longer
@karppinen
Well yes and no. Friend of mine just had is 3 year old TV declared "too old" for ITVX (VOD/replay for one of the largest TV broadcaster here in the UK).
They will go around it by installing whatever stick but this could be avoided by manufacturers not having such a fast cycle (same issue with phones)
@karppinen
Oh and i don't think people arguing that watching netflix is as bad as driving SUV are receptive to any numerical/science based arguments 
@karppinen I learn a lot on this platform.
@karppinen Wow - wildly impressive, and really good to see that they care about these engineering aspects. But I guess that doesn't include the backend storage, or the network usage beyond that server. So that's not the only energy cost in the process. But nice work 
@karppinen
Watching Netflix via Amazon Firestick adds 40W to TV power consumption - I guess due to HDMI encryption?
@vampirdaddy wow, that’s pretty bad. How much is just the Firestick if you’re not watching Netflix (just browsing the menus and whatnot)?
@vampirdaddy The only conceivable reason for this is that your TV and/or Fire stick is shit. HDMI encryption and decryption wouldn't be any significant fraction of 40W.
**edit**: I was thinking of power consumption related to computery stuff such as signal processing, which shouldn't ever go that high, but maybe it's something else?
@nex Can‘t be the FireStick as its USB power supply is limited to 1A = 5W
Maybe some scaling stuff within the TV?
@vampirdaddy I was fairly confident about what it wouldn't be, but I'm pretty clueless about what it could be …
Though maybe it's not the TV doing something stupid after all? One thing I just thought of: What if the Fire stick delivers an HDR (10-bit) signal and the source you're comparing it to only SDR? If the TV has an LED backlight, it might be turned up higher when HDR footage is playing, or maybe even just when switching to that input?
OLED, OTOH, would only change peak power draw.
@karppinen What's the energy comparison to asking chatgpt any question?
@karppinen But it is a nice number showing how energy efficient you can be if you want to.
@karppinen
That's a statement that requires expansion. The hundred Watts is the power requirement of the server? or just the network interface? And the huge number of gigabytes of video data themselves... the storage of that is in a zero Watt data centre somewhere? I applaud every attempt to reduce our colossal energy demands, but I have to filter everything through my uh-huh server... ;-)
@incredibish the whole server, as far as I can tell, including the local storage on it. The content of course must come from somewhere, but I would expect them to reach pretty good cache rates with these appliances.
So if the hit rate is 99%, for example, the upstream servers could be 100x more energy intensive and still only add another 8 milliwatts to the cost of the stream.
And you can run 4k screens with a 15 dollar watch sized dongle, but 4k computer requires a $300 video card
@karppinen that's a hell of a network card. Something like $4k-$20k depending on specs, seems like?
@zrail yeah, and pretty much unobtainium. Then again, the ConnectX-4 Lx’s in my servers are from decommissioned Netflix OCAs so I guess these too will trickle down eventually
@karppinen ok and the routers, and switches, and …
@karppinen Honesty, I don't even care about the specifics because it will always be much more efficient than buying DVDs.
@eloy @karppinen but If they decide to delist the movie, you would still have the DVDs or blurays to watch.
@karppinen According to the video stream for that talk, this refered to a prototype that wasn't ready or in use at the moment he talked about it and consumed at least 125 watts when last measured:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q4TZxj-Dq7s
Around 23:00
So while the idea is nothing new and it's quite possible (people have been running Yocto Linux with nginx and Offload directly on #nvidia #Bluefield for a while), those slides do not prove #netflix "can now" do it.
@Sturmflut okay, that’s disappointing. Wish the slides were more clear. Of course the bigger ones get there on a per-Gbps basis but I guess they’re limited to larger metros / networks
@karppinen I was quite negatively surprised as well that someone would put out such a statement on a slide with zero context/disclaimers. Especially when the rest seems to be so technical and precise.
@Sturmflut like someone mentioned, the DPUs in question are not exactly a household part, so it may be that from the team’s perpective the tech is done but just not available to deploy en masse
@karppinen Mellanox/NVIDIA has been trying to shove #BlueField into any customer box they can for years. They're even mandatory in some configurations (e.g. DGX) and there's no shortage of stock.
The "Self-Hosted DPU Controller" mode mentioned in the video has been officially supported with BSP 4.5.0 since December 2023, but customers like #Netflix and us got access to that long before.
Probably Netflix is actually running this right now at 100 Watts, but we have no confirmation.