Yeah I should clarify. This is a very vague estimate around "total energy spent for making a video you wouldn't otherwise do" which includes stuff like lighting, transportation, video transcoding on the server, script writing, actor coordination, etc. E.g. if someone drives somewhere solely to make a video they otherwise wouldn't, then it gets included.

I hedged as "not unlikely" because I'd need to think harder about the amortization of more energy expensive videos vs less energy expensive ones and how much energy you can actually attribute to a video vs the video solely being an activity that would be an add-on to something that would happen anyways.

But it's not just the energy expenditure of a phone.

(I also think that 0.5 kilowatt-hours is an overestimate of energy expenditure by potentially up to two orders of magnitude depending on how much batching is done, but my original comment did say 0.5 kWh).