Environmental Impacts of Shifting from Movie Disc Media to Movie Streaming: Case Study and Sensitivity Analysis

Abstract

This case study involved a comparative environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) to analyze the impact of watching a movie on Blu-ray/DVD (physical movie distribution) compared with watching the same movie on a streaming service (digital movie distribution). Considering a viewer in Michigan, USA as the reference case, the journey of a movie file from production to viewing via both the physical and digital distribution models was considered. Data to populate the inventory was assembled from prior LCAs, corporate reporting, and the EcoInvent database. The TRACI impact assessment method was used to generate comparative environmental performance metrics in a variety of environmental dimensions. As expected, the digital distribution model outperformed the physical distribution model across environmental dimensions. The question was then posed how much more digital streaming would need to occur before environmental impacts of digital streaming would be higher than the physical distribution model. This is a relevant question given that in 2017 consumer movie viewing in the USA was almost 8x higher than at the time of peak movie consumption when the physical distribution dominated. The comparative LCA showed that, for the example of global warming potential, the environmental emissions of digital distribution are ultimately higher if the digital distribution leads to more than 4x the amount of movie viewing. Future work should consider the impact of digital streaming on all viewing since the impact of streaming impacts on media beyond movies, as increases in movie consumption in principle could reduce other forms of media consumption. It should also consider movie viewing habits on devices other than televisions.