Spotify’s move to video increases its environmental footprint

Spotify currently has 675 million users. Now, as it expands into video and as more people use Spotify, the app’s environmental footprint is set to increase.

In-video advertisements that aim to increase ad revenue involve artificial intelligence to tap into a users’ preferences. This means many individual videos with minor differences requiring additional processing scaled to the user’s streaming resolution.

But while Spotify used to publish data on its environmental costs, its reports have been incomplete since 2021. As American author Shoshanna Zuboff says, many tech companies lack environmental accountability.

The Carbon Trust, a consultancy that helps businesses reduce their carbon footprints, works to globally promote a sustainable future and has calculated the European average carbon footprint for video streaming as producing 55g of CO2 per hour. This CO2 or carbon dioxide equivalent is a comparable measure of the potential effect of different greenhouse gases on the climate: 55g of CO2 is 50 times more than audio streaming and the equivalent of microwaving four bags of popcorn.

While companies’ significant role in generating emissions should not be diminished, the shift of responsibility from the platform to users and content creators means better informed choices about their streaming devices and streaming quality settings larger screens need to be made. Streaming at higher resolutions becomes significant factors in increasing video’s carbon footprint.

There is an absolute burden of responsibility on tech and media companies to reduce their carbon emissions and to be transparent about their efforts to do so.

In fact, net zero cannot be achieved without commitments from the major technology companies, many of which are based in the United States whose government has not ratified the Kyoto protocol and withdrew from the Paris agreement in 2020 which are both significant global efforts to combat climate change. – The Conversation

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