Indeed ...
Today,
this electricity market report came out. It's not like people who are streaming their content are the true bad guys and causing all this environmental trouble. But I'm afraid we're going to hear much more of this in the near future due to the fact that un-organised AV content consumers/streamers are an easy target, unlike large industries and other 'essential' energy needs.
According to Fraunhofer - the people behind MP3, HEVC, all kinds of compression techniques - videostreaming takes up around 80% of Internet traffic and the Internet as a whole is responsible for somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the yearly global energy consumption. So I can understand that scientists and politicians are looking for ways to make all this more cost-effective.
But this should
never interfere with the integrity of the content as it was produced. Suggesting that we as consumers should make do with technically low quality content to save energy is like saying that a book can be printed with only half the amount of letters, in order to save polluting paper and ink.
Personally, I can clearly see a big difference between the UHD image quality from a disc versus a lowly streaming outlet, Amazon being the worst, all the way up to Apple TV 4K. But physical media are ultimately on the way out I'm afraid and therefore, in my opinion, the streaming quality needs to go up, instead of down. We need a lot more green and renewable energy and - if possible - even better codecs for increased sound and image quality. Lossless compression techniques that will help us get better streaming for less energy will of course be very welcome.
I also wanted to take a moment to thank the OP for starting this topic, I have been meaning to begin a discussion like this myself ever since the low bandwidth COVID-19 trouble, this spring. I fear we're going to hear much more of this in the near future and I hope everyone involved will start to see that merely cutting off data rates is not the solution.
Here's to hoping streaming outlets and Internet service providers are well aware of this and that they are already thinking about ways to get high-quality content streamed into our homes in a green, energy efficient and planet-friendly way.
But it
has to be high quality!