Stranger Things‘ most recent season was pretty good and I’m totally in the mood for more streaming. Anyone else down for a Netflix and chill session? No? How about a Netflix and kill session? Because you may be in for one of those even if you don’t wanna be. That’s right; watching too much TV is a bad thing. And we aren’t even talking in a purely cardiovascular way anymore, either. The world as we know it is dying, and streaming is apparently speeding up the process.
The Shift Project, a Paris-based nonprofit, determined that the power needed to stream just ten minutes of content was equal to running a 2,000-watt oven on broil for five minutes. Heck, that’s even worse than driving to the theater to see the movie, per the same study. Apparently, two hours of continuous streaming equals about six kilograms of CO2, whereas driving to a theater would garner only about 200 grams per person, even including the theater’s use of air conditioning.
Furthermore, emissions from the digital era of video will rise from 2.5% to 4% thanks to the glut of entertainment out there. Death may follow some of the viewers of a lot of these shows, too, as people who watch more than four hours of television a day are 50% more likely to die of heart disease. Maybe don’t binge all of Stranger Things in one sitting. Even the Wii told people to go outside sometimes.
Netflix has the power to change these things, though. They certainly listen to studies, seeing as how they’re cutting tobacco out of all future TV-14/PG-13 productions since parents threw hissy fits over Hopper’s infatuation with cigarettes. Maybe they could take measures to invest in greener energy, find ways to cut back on emissions into the atmosphere, and, I dunno, make shows with half hour intermissions to tell people to go take a jog?
Either way, we’re all dying and Netflix isn’t helping things, apparently. But will they do anything to change that? Time will tell, but this new study is certainly pretty eye-opening.
