Incentives for Green Video Streaming

In today’s hyperconnected world, video streaming is ubiquitous, yet it carries an often invisible cost in energy consumption and carbon emissions. We develop a framework that motivates ICT service consumers - focusing here on video streamers - to make more energy‑conscious choices. Our approach combines behavioural incentives, including environmental points, peer recognition, and gamified challenges, with economic incentives, creating a balanced mechanism that appeals to both environmentally conscious and self‑interested users. Our findings show that this strategy enables proactive, application‑level control of energy consumption; that data‑driven, personalized, and scalable incentives can substantially improve the sustainability of video‑streaming systems while controlling provider costs; and that monetary incentives alone are insufficient, as social motivation amplifies budget efficiency and supports greener behaviour even at lower cost.