BBC Documentaries

Dirty Streaming: The Internet's Big Secret (2020x35)

: 05, 2020

Next time you’re falling down a YouTube rabbit hole, think about this: all the watching, gaming and gramming we do is as polluting as flying. The internet is using a larger proportion of the world’s energy than ever before and, with the rollout of 5G, it’s set to keep on growing. Film and TV writer Beth Webb goes in search of the internet and discovers that ‘the cloud’ is actually a vast network of energy-guzzling data centres and undersea cables. Most of it is in Virginia, its biggest day-to-day threat is fishing boats, and those five billion streams of Despacito? They used the same amount of energy as five African countries put together over an entire year.