Rapid improvements in data acquisition and processing technologies as well as developments in communication within and beyond the scientific community offer exciting opportunities to gain new insights into ecosystem structure and function from the local to the global scale. These new opportunities have only been marginally embraced in analyses of stream ecosystem processes. Nevertheless, data from permanently deployed oxygen probes at multiple sites across the globe lend themselves to derive large-scale patterns of ecosystem metabolism. Insights into methane dynamics have been obtained at large scale by taking advantage of the broad spatial coverage enabled by citizen science. Coordinated distributed experiments have been carried out using standardized leaf litter or analogs such as cotton strips and tea bags. Similar coordinated experiments could be conducted around the world on nutrient transformations, primary production and other ecosystem processes. Precedents of such initiatives reach as far back as to tests of the River Continuum Concept across the conterminous USA and later continental-scale analyses on nitrogen transformations. Molecular analyses also hold potential for shedding light on ecosystem processes, especially when targeting RNA, proteins and metabolites, and when combined with citizen science or robotic sampling approaches, the latter facilitating access also to remote areas. At the other end of the spectrum, remote sensing at ever finer spatial, temporal and spectral resolution offers opportunities for analyzing large-scale patterns. These examples are meant to illustrate potentials and inspire future initiatives towards documenting and understanding ecosystem processes in streams at the continental and global scale. A major impediment, however, is the lack of an effective funding mechanisms for global-scale ecosystem studies, calling for a supranational body or greatly improved collaboration of national funding agencies to alleviate the current constraints.