Video traffic, would it be snapchat/youtube/netflix/vimeo/etc uses a lot of dedicated bandwidth with expensive servers which usually have a very good availability and reliability, but at the cost of servers and energy.
Peertube is a totally different model which doesn't really allow users to view a video with a similar quality or latency (the video might take more time to load), but it does work and the platform use client upload capabilities, which would be better if a video is very demanded.
The problem when studying carbon emissions of IT is that there are too many factors:
* equipment of the client
* equipment of the server (on top of housing cost, cooling costs, maintenance etc)
* equipment of the ISP
* Energy spent by the ISP/server/client
Those parameters are even more difficult to estimate in a P2P environment.
I'm curious if peertube would be more carbon/energy/bandwidth/hardware friendly in general. Do you also think that a P2P model would also be better for the environment, potentially or in reality?
P2P likely just moves the energy use to less efficient devices. It might also use more bandwidth since re-transmission is common (peer goes away halfway through passing on a segment so it needs to be requested from another peer).
If a P2P network isn't aware of it's network paths the traffic might also have to traverse a lot more infrastructure than a nearby datacenter (e.g. UK viewer peering with DE, FI and FR peers).