Non-equilibrium steady-states (NESSs) are characterized by the existence of macroscopic heat currents flowing between two or more reservoirs. However, the existence of these currents also implies that information is constantly being transmitted from one reservoir to the other. In this seminar I will address recent efforts in characterizing this transport of information in the NESS. This will be done in the context of a repeated interactions model which, as we show, allows one to cast the NESS precisely within the scenario of noisy communication channels. The thermodynamic work cost associated with maintaining this transport will be discussed in detail. Next we discuss how the ability of the excitations to transfer information from one part of the system to the other can be quantified by the conditional mutual information (CMI), a more general measure of tripartite correlations. These ideas are applied to an exactly soluble model allowing for both ballistic and diffusive behavior. Our approach allows us to compute the CMI for arbitrary sizes and thus find the scaling rules connecting information transport and diffusivity. Finally, we discuss how this new perspective in the characterization of non-equilibrium systems may be applied to understand the issue of local equilibration in non-equilibrium states