HITS

Every week seems to bring the launch of more streaming services across the world, with consumers’ insatiable appetite for content resulting in more conversations around sustainability and the impact on energy consumption.

The industry, however, needs to study best practices to encourage a more efficient use of energy across the entertainment supply chain.

After focusing on content delivery networks (CDNs) for several years, “I wanted to look at sustainability in the streaming sector,” Dom Robinson, founder of Greening of Streaming, an organization created to address growing concerns about the energy impact of the streaming sector, said during the session “Green Streams – The Green Mile is More of a Marathon” at the Nov. 15 British Hollywood Innovation & Transformation Summit (HITS) event in London.

He noted that he had watched a film about data centers and how much energy was being consumed by them and became concerned.

So he started the organization Greening of Streaming about 18 months ago, he noted.

He pointed to the telcos that link all those data centers up and noted how crypto has been “demonized for its environmental impact.”

But he told attendees that, in the same period of time, “150 million people joined Disney Plus [and] every one of their machines has a GPU in it…. So think about that impact.”

Therefore, “I started asking the people at the CDN conferences, the architects of Disney and Netflix and Akamai … what was their sustainability strategy, what were they thinking about in terms of architecting services,” he recalled.

“And, to a man,” he recalled, at “the first conference, they all went, ‘I don’t know.’” So from 2018-2019, “our industry really wasn’t thinking” about these issues, he noted.

The industry instead “relied on those providers to sort out the environmental issues,” he said, adding the industry “architected around performance, low latency” and other issues that “make CDNs make content delivery usable.”

It was “time to do something about” green issues within the streaming sector, he went on to say. “And actually over the last three years as I’ve been running those conferences, I had to stop because Greening in Streaming has become so busy” as everyone has “started talking about environmental sustainability, energy demand, and the impact that digital media was having.”

He later pointed out that, “If you want to watch Lord of the Rings in HDR on your home cinema with your family, you can lean forward and press a gold button and bump the energy right up because you are going to get value from it.”

But, “at the moment, 4K content … might be 60-70 percent of the caching infrastructure in the internet for less than half a percent of the viewers,” he said.

So an important question, he said, is: “Is there any point in burning all that energy? Is there any point in pushing AK 120 frames per second HDR to six screens in a pub with one person in it in the middle of the day? No. So we need to look at that as an industry and stop chasing these top line figures, which are just over-provisioning. We need to think about that because we are burning a lot of energy in our industry and it’s only going to continue growing.”

He encouraged everybody attending to “get involved” on these issues.

To view the entire session, click here.

To download the presentation, click here.

The British Hollywood Innovation & Transformation Summit, held in conjunction with the EIDR Annual Participant Meeting, was sponsored by Whip Media, GeoComply, Perforce, Signiant, and EIDR, was programmed under the guidance of the content advisors of the Hollywood IT Society, and was produced by MESA and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS).