M+E Daily

Video made up 82% of internet traffic in 2022 and it is still growing. Its impact on the environment, therefore, is one of the media and entertainment industry’s biggest challenges, according to Synamedia.

That is because, “with its popularity, its impact on the environment also grows,” Birgit Merkle of Synamedia said Feb. 7, while serving as moderator of the webinar “Towards a Greener Streaming.”

“The question today is is there a path towards a greener and environmental friendlier streaming solution for videos?” she added.

Among the key questions addressed by Sebastian Manemann, principal product manager at Synamedia, during the webinar were: How can we reduce the carbon footprint of streaming? What alternative technology solutions are there?  How can just-in-time technology reduce costs and energy consumption? And what does just-In-time everything mean for the future of streaming?

“Today we are going to talk a bit about what could be an option for greener streaming,” Manemann said.

“First of all, when we talk about greener streaming, we kind of need to level set, what we are talking about,” he said. “And for that it is kind of important to understand what is energy, what is power and how does that reflect on the streaming environment.”

If you study the ”production of energy over the course of the, I think, last 200 and a few years … you can see that the energy that we consume or that we produce, and it’s only produced because we consume it, is growing kind of exponentially,” he pointed out.

There is just a “finite amount of resources available, and that’s the reason why we have to think about what energy do we use, in which context do we use it, and how can we reduce the footprint of the individual consumer,” he said.

Returning to the question ‘what is energy,’ it is important to understand two things here,” he told viewers. “The first thing is that if we talk about energy, we also have to talk about power.  And power is what it takes to run equipment at a given moment in time.”

Mobile phone usage tends to consume a significant amount of energy, he pointed out. So does driving a car to the supermarket and using electric heaters, he said.

He moved on to ask what one hour of streaming is worth in terms of energy. One must factor in all the data centres, networks and internet traffic dedicated to video today and that is expected to only increase higher and higher, he noted.

The “fundamental problem that we are facing here” is that it can be difficult to figure out just how much energy is consumed from streaming, he said. Many studies have been done to gauge how much energy is consumed from watching Netflix for 30 minutes, he noted, adding studies have yielded different results.
“Since all those studies are intended to illustrate the same thing, it is kind of odd to see the results varying that much,” he added.

While some of the studies don’t really factor in the internet, others make an assumption that content delivery network traffic “does not consume any” energy or just “a bit of energy,” he said. “So there are some missing factors in that equation that make it really hard to indicate the correct numbers here.”

Quortex, a French company that was recently acquired by Synamedia, offers a streaming solution that allows for greener streaming, he went on to say.

Quortex offers a containerised video streaming architecture leveraging EC2 Spot Instances for cost optimisation, and it has become a new way of offering video streaming services on Amazon Web Services (AWS).