21581 - SCTE Broadband August2022 COMPLETE v1

80 Vol. 44 No. 3 - September 2022 Issue spotlight on Many telecoms and media companies have announced carbon targets and renewable initiatives. Is that enough? The industry is late to the party when it comes to sustainability. The 2021 report, “The Carbon Impact of Video Streaming” by the Carbon Trust estimated that one hour of video streaming emits a total of 50-60g of CO2. Petrol cars emit many times that amount, but the climate emergency is such that the media and entertainment industry can certainly contribute to eliminate carbon in the system. The initially pure broadcast landscape is now turning into a multi-screen/networks playground where much of the focus goes to optimising performance. The first challenge is to change the mindset and adopt a holistic footprint of carbon use across the chain. Can you give us an idea of the scope and complexity of what this means? There are multiple carbon cost centres including: shooting and production (camera); content processing (compression); delivery (e.g. CDN) and display (TV, mobile, etc). Most of the current carbon cost comes from the display side. This poses some questions that cause friction: How do you account for the lifespan of a TV across multiple services? If you are a streaming provider, how can you control and measure a device that you don’t own? On the measurement side, there are also some challenges: what are the metrics we measure? Possibly watt per channel, but based on which delivery (eyeballs) expectations? As you can see, there are currently more questions than answers – but that’s good as it can stimulate us all to achieve greater results. How is Ateme responding? Ateme deals with video processing and delivery: we provide the tools to ingest, process and stream bits and bytes. Consequently, such technology is quite CPU demanding. After all, compression and packaging are about computation and CDN/caching is all about speed and access. However, Ateme’s technologies are also designed to provide best-of- breed performance based on CPU horsepower: the more we have, the better and faster we will process the video. We see the consequence of this when the optimisation of solutions (in terms of processing density, caching efficiency) is inversely correlated with the resources that we need. The more our solutions are optimised, the less CPU they need, the lower the carbon footprint is by channel/content. Reducingbitrates leads to further carbon reduction. Yes, but optimisation goes further than this. Lower bitrates also mean less storage, less bandwidth required to stream as well as reduced consumption on the display device while maintaining pristine images. Our analytics show we can dynamically adjust compression and streaming to match what is strictly needed and therefore to optimise on the end-user device, again contributing to carbon reduction. Spotlight on Improving audience engagement while enhancing sustainability by Remi Beaudouin, Chief Strategy Officer, ATEME Sustainability I N F O C U S Information and communication technologies (ICT) may consume a fraction of the carbon of the aviation industry but, unlike flying, the internet is used by pretty much everyone. As connectivity and video streaming increases so will video’s share of the global carbon footprint. The industry must and can do more to act.