CCB Magazine

This year's MediaTech Hub Conference is (also) about green streaming. Dom Robinson, director and co-founder of Greening of Streaming, an interest group that brings players from the industry together, will be the speaker. We wanted to know from him: Can streaming be (more) environmentally friendly?
 

INTERVIEW  Boris Messing

CCB Magazine:Streaming is the new television, and streaming services consume a lot of energy. How can the carbon footprint of a streaming service be calculated?

Dom Robinson:A good question. The industry itself is currently focusing on this, but as a whole there is little to no consensus yet. Early claims in this space have almost entirely come from onlookers, analysts and academics and been extrapolated from ‘lab tests’ on various components or used ‘data attribution’ models but with little real understanding or insight into how services are actually deployed and operated in real world Content Delivery Network and streaming infrastructures. So, any figures making estimates from outside the industry at the moment are not taken seriously by the industry itself. 

CCB Magazine:According to a study by the French think tank Shift Project, the Co2 equivalent of video streaming in 2018 was more than 300 million tons. A third of this, according to the study, was due to on-demand services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. Is this a credible figure?

Dom Robinson:The shift report was widely discredited since it not only used ‘data attribution’ models but they had a calculation out between bits and bytes making their results out by a factor of 8. This was corrected by George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency and many others have supported that. Shift themselves corrected this and brought their estimates down considerably. Only the industry has the touch points with the infrastructure to really evaluate such things, and the industry itself is still in the throes of working out how to measure such things. The one figure we tend to accept is that about 3% of world energy is being used by Information and Communication Technology, and with Cisco and others estimating that 70-80% of all network traffic is now video streaming. We at Greening of Streaming talk about streaming ‘probably’ requiring between 1% and 2% of World Energy.

The one figure we tend to accept is that about 3% of world energy is being used by Information and Communication Technology, and with Cisco and others estimating that 70-80% of all network traffic is now video streaming

In Talk with Creative City Berlin, Dom Robinson. Photo: privat.

CCB Magazine:What are the most promising measures and ideas to make streaming less CO2-intensive?

Dom Robinson:Even if the entire Information and Communication Technology industry moved to renewable energy we, as engineers, seek to be better energy citizens so our infrastructures do not consume ‘all’ the renewables, leaving energy available for other critical uses such as heating and refrigeration. That said we have key focus working groups investigating a move of thinking from ‘bandwidth’ to ‘infrastructure availability’ – the latter is actually what is consuming the energy. Energy is not (despite most thinking) relating to usage of infrastructure; it is actually being consumed in the provisioning and making available of infrastructure. In simple terms ‘everything is provisioned for peak all the time’ – so this means that Service Level Agreements along the supply chains are hugely impacting and are the immediately low hanging fruit for making significant change.

CCB Magazine:Who plays the most important role in reducing emissions from streaming: users or providers?  

Dom Robinson:Absolutely 100% the providers. We have a range of surveys we completed with the public and announced in our UK Parliament event this summer, that highlight that while there is increasing awareness in the consumer, they are almost entirely unable to do anything more to reduce energy other than turn off their TV or Laptop when they are not using it. That is about all they can do. The vast majority of the 24/7 energy is in the infrastructure. The set top box features a lot in reports because it is relatively easy for independents to measure energy of such devices in a ‘lab' and conjecture scale. But the set top box is turned off regularly, where the many caching servers, routers, distribution amplifiers and so on are all on all the time. This is absolutely a problem that is in the hands of the providers, and it is the providers who can determine the technologies that are in the set top boxes.

The providers play the most important role in reducing emissions from streaming. They determine the technologies that are in the set top boxes

CCB Magazine:Which players in the streaming service sector play the most crucial role in making streaming greener? 

Dom Robinson:The Telcos are the organizations that actually foot the electricity bills. Typically, streaming infrastructure is hosted in their facilities. Overzealous ‘new’ codecs that are only supported in software in consumer electronics can offer new features to the consumer (HDR / UHD etc.) but can massively increase the energy requirements compared to less advanced codecs which are supported on hardware Digital Signal Processors which are many times more efficient. We need to have a conversation across the consumer and industry about what ‘good enough’ is and ensure that we engineer to a baseline optimized for energy efficiency that has a ‘good enough’ quality. This will involve everyone in the supply chain. No one party can do this on their own, and it cannot be a ‘competitive’ thing: With sustainability issues we only win if we all win, so it relies on collaboration. Every actor is important.

CCB Magazine:The EU Green Deal aims to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Are there similar deals in place at the major streaming providers? 

Dom Robinson:No, there is nothing specific that I am aware of. There is nothing to base such a measurement or deal on at this stage. Policy that is emerging is quite often based on isolated analyst views and full of hyperbole and a lack of real understanding of the engineering challenges (through a lack of real dialogue with the industry).

We are at saturation. We reached it during the pandemic. Everyone ‘understood’ streaming and adopted it

CCB Magazine:Does it cost more money to make streaming greener? And if so, how much more expensive will streaming services become?

Dom Robinson:Not really. Systems are churned out over 5-to-7-year periods anyway. ‘Greening’ tends to extend hardware lifecycles through innovation in software which is typically relatively low cost compared to new hardware. Also, with the energy crisis at the moment savings in energy efficiency make significant differences to cost of operations and so as we save the energy the effective price of streaming can potentially be lowered (certainly compared to not improving the situation and simply paying for more energy inefficiency). Obviously at a major scale reengineering data center and so on does require capital investment, but the day-to-day cost of energy is a much bigger challenge than finding the resources for inevitable reinvestment into a ‘living’ architecture that constantly evolves. So, streaming may become more expensive because of rising energy prices, but work to increase the efficiency is pushing back on that rise hard and fast.

CCB Magazine:Finally, a prediction please: How will streaming services develop over the next ten years? What growth is expected?

Dom Robinson:We are at saturation. We reached it during the pandemic. Everyone ‘understood’ streaming and adopted it. We are no longer in the early-stage of the industry. There is already growth in live linear streaming - this is now significant, particularly around news and sport, and will challenge linear TV further. We must also keep in mind that streaming includes conference calling, audio streaming and other applications, and those are all in growth too. However, the innovation in the space is absolutely certainly all about energy efficiency and that is the area to watch if you want to explore growth in the sector: And a lot of that involves doing something invisible to the consumer – namely doing exactly what we are doing already but doing so considerably more energy efficiently.

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