New M&E Industry Initiatives Spark Debate Over Best Way to Meet Sustainability Goals

By Fred Dawson

What’s it going to take to generate the behavioral shifts essential to making a significant dent in the M&E industry’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions?

This was the question driving a lively debate on sustainability issues during the latest two-hour installment of the Sustainability Expert Series symposiums co-produced by Broadcast Projects and CTO Innovation Consulting. Aired on May 9, the discussion largely revolved around two approaches to moving consumers to make greener choices at mass scales.

Is It Green or Is It Gold?

One, labeled the “green button” solution by symposium speakers, involves persuading consumers to sacrifice some degree of quality of experience in favor of greener outcomes by triggering emissions-reducing service and device settings on their UIs. The other, the “gold button” option, would entail industry agreement on a set of less-than-optimal but “good-enough” default settings. Users would be free to opt out of default mode, but they would know that doing so goes against the green grain.

With video streaming accounting for an ever-greater share of content consumption, the search for ways to lower the industry’s emissions footprint necessarily focuses on altering suppliers’ and consumers’ behavior patterns in the streamed media marketplace. The goal shared on both sides of the debate is to formulate a consensus-driven path to better sustainability outcomes than we’ve seen so far from piecemeal initiatives scattered across the M&E ecosystem.

Too much of the sustainability effort has been about entities vying to establish superior sustainability credentials, said software entrepreneur Dom Robinson, who is helping to lead the charge on the sustainability front as founder of the international Greening of Streaming consortium. Robinson, one of three featured speakers at the symposium, said the industry needs to think systemically with a focus on reducing overall operational energy rather than arguing over who has the best approach to mitigating carbon footprints at different points in the streaming supply chain.

“You can’t win sustainability,” he commented. “You can only win if we all win together.”

Achieving any lasting effects through either the green- or gold-button approach to sustainability would require broad concurrence on metrics tracking the impact various processes related to preparing, streaming, and consuming video content have on energy consumption. That’s a tall order, especially when it comes to reaching consensus on what constitutes energy consumption in a good-enough quality scenario under the gold-button agenda.

Analogs to the green-button strategy abound as ever more people worldwide are drawn into making green purchasing decisions involving everything from food and apparel to washing machines and cars. Because these choices are colored by tradeoffs that can involve higher costs, fewer selections, less convenience, or other factors, backers of a green-button M&E strategy express confidence a sizeable portion of climate-conscious consumers would give up some measure of energy-consuming benefits in favor of greener outcomes

In contrast, the gold button concept breaks new ground with few if any parallels in other fields. Kristan Bullett, another featured symposium speaker who heads up the sustainability analytics developer Humans Not Robots, Ltd., was highly skeptical this approach would pan out.

“Obviously capturing data is a very challenging thing to do,” Bullett said. “Across the whole supply chain there’s so many data points that need to be captured, I think there’s a real risk that we’ll start to get some data points, but that it will be very difficult [to] achieve savings from those data points unless you cover everything. And if you’re covering everything with the supply chain, that’s a huge challenge.”

The LESS Accord

But Robinson made clear that, notwithstanding the immense challenges, Greening of Screening (GoS) is dead serious about promoting the gold-button approach through what it calls the Low Energy Sustainable Streaming (LESS) Accord. Acknowledging GoS is posing a “tough question,” Robinson said, “We want to challenge the status quo thinking that selling more 8K, more megabits, selling more Gs with the mobile phones, is the right way forward.”

GoS is soliciting input across every segment of the streaming ecosystem from studio and cinematics to production, distribution, and device manufacture. The goal is to define a “default streaming encoding profile energy optimized with acceptable quality for general viewing rather than, as it is today, quality optimized and over provisioned with no energy considerations,” Robinson added.

As described in GoS documentation, participants hope that defining a universally accepted streaming default mode would guide universal design of caching, encoding, and decoding platforms that would deliver maximum energy efficiency at the default level while making higher quality settings available for consumer activation. With public sensitivity to benefits from advances like HDR and 4K or 8K UHD at a low ebb, planners believe this could result in reduced use of features that can increase energy consumption by as much as 50% to 100%.

A hopeless quest? Maybe, but over its brief year-and-a-half lifespan GoS has amassed an impressive lineup of over 30 members, including leading industry vendors like Akamai, AMD, Ateme, Broadpeak, Intel, Microsoft, and Synamedia as well as startups and two leading organizations, the UK-based trade group IABM and the European Broadcast Union (EBU). The LESS Accord agenda also got a boost in April from the NAB, which named GoS the winner of the Excellence in Sustainability Award in the non-profit organization leadership category.

The initiative is coming up on a key test of its strength, starting in late May when GoS members are scheduled to create a shortlist of promising ideas from submissions that followed the group’s call to action at the IBC’s Accelerator Kickstart event in early February. The plan calls for choosing the most testable ideas with a view toward developing real-world production models that would demonstrate their viability, Robinson said.

Then, on June 21, GoS will stage an event paired with the June 20 virtual Media Tech Sustainability Summit featuring workshops and presentations aimed at generating initial designs for tests that will be undertaken using members’ resources later in the summer. Streaming the event from Brussels, GoS also hopes to use the occasion to introduce its plans to policy makers and industry regulatory experts.

Ideas testing out as measuring up to energy efficiency expectations will be presented at the annual IBC convention in September. Following feedback from IBC, GoS will schedule a more rigorous round of testing through late March and then turn the results over to one of its working groups for analysis.

After that a meeting will be scheduled in Burbank to engage Hollywood “golden-eye” viewing experts for their assessments of how these energy-optimized solutions impact quality as measured against optimal quality parameters. These reviews will be strongly focused on small-screen environments where quality disparities might be far less noticeable while energy savings could be immense.

“For streaming consumers, differences in quality are often imperceptible,” Robinson noted. “Yet each incremental quality increase may demand significantly more energy.” He added that while top decision makers in the streaming sector lean heavily toward the “more-is-better” philosophy as a selling point irrespective of actual perceived benefits, industry engineers are often of a different mind, thinking, “We’re just chasing things for the sake of salesmen’s benefits that have an impact on the environment.”

Focusing on What Consumers Really Want

Kristan Bullett said Humans Not Robots is taking a very different approach with the aim of offering an analytics and monitoring platform that can foster reductions in environmental impacts without going against the industry’s deep commitment to innovation. Here the goal is to compile data verifying what consumers actually want in terms of quality and features, which would eliminate wasting energy on things they don’t care about.

Beyond that, it might be possible to introduce a green-button approach to letting consumers choose energy reduction over getting everything they want, Bullett said. “Isn’t there a way to incentivize users to sacrifice the quality of the video they’re watching?” he asked.

Ultimately, the gold-button approach runs up against the business interests that dominate decision making, Bullett noted. “On the business side of the house, we’re looking at how we improve ARPU, how do we improve our overall customer base, how do we make more money out of all this,” he said. “And this (LESS Accord initiative) goes effectively in the face of that.”

In contrast, using analytics to avoid spending money on things consumers don’t want is in line with business interests, he added. “If you use less of something, it costs you less, so there are definitely tangible commercial benefits,” he said.

Another approach to concerted action toward sustainability having nothing to do with the green/gold-button debate was posited by Vincent Grivet, a senior industry consultant who serves as chairman of the HbbTV Association, the European organization devoted to interactive TV development. Grivet said he wanted to share “an unexpected, provocative idea: can we make streaming greener using push-and-cache technology over legacy broadcast infrastructure?”

Along with his other responsibilities, Grivet for the past three years has been running the Low Carbon TV Delivery Project (LoCaT), which has developed data and a measuring tool known as DIMPACT to guide European media interests toward greater reliance on digital terrestrial television (DTT) to minimize consumer reliance on internet-based services. With 42% of European households in reach of DTT broadcasts, leading broadcasters and other backers of the effort believe this could make a big difference environmentally.

Defining Meaningful Metrics

The sustainability benefits are derived from a LoCaT-sponsored study comparing the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts of linear and on-demand viewing on TV screens over DTT, unmanaged internet, and managed IPTV connections. Based on measures taken in 2020, the study found that the energy consumption associated with one device viewing hour delivered via DTT was 14 Watt hours (Wh) compared to 109 Wh for OTT and 153 Wh for IPTV. This equated to 3g of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (CO2e) for DTT, 26g CO2e for OTT and 37 gCO2e for IPTV, excluding the energy consumption of the TV set itself, which averaged around 56 Wh or 13 g CO2 per hour.

While the study suggested OTT can be seen as the “ideal complement” to DTT for viewing on-demand content, it suggested that shifting viewing of the most popular on-demand traffic to DTT through use of in-home caching components “could bring an additional environmental benefit.” This was the main point of Grivet’s presentation.

“When people watch streaming, they watch the fat tail,” he said, noting that, on average, with 20,000 hours’ worth of on-demand viewing 50% of usage is focused on 10-20 catalog hours of content. Such an approach would avoid the complications and costs of DVR-based recording and storing of content for time-shifted viewing by automating caching of broadcast across the DTT service footprint based on viewing patterns at any point in time, much as CDN caching works to move time-shifted content closer to end users.

Grivet suggested that if widespread implementation of the caching solution could result in just a 10% reduction in energy consumed by TV viewing in Europe, the effort would be worthwhile. High-energy consuming streaming hours could be significantly reduced with no user impact using the “intrinsically green delivery platform, broadcast DTT,” he said.

But Robinson challenged calculations of energy use based on how much traffic is streamed over network infrastructure at any moment in time. “There’s almost no evidence that not using the network saves any energy,” he said, noting that everything in the infrastructure that supports streaming is using more or less the same amount of energy no matter how many bits are flowing over the network.

He sharply criticized a widely held belief that one gigabyte of streamed video consumption equates to generating one kilogram of carbon. “That’s been the low-hanging fruit for the industry to jump on as a way to account for sustainability,” he said. “All sorts of efficient energy groups are trying to promote this idea that reducing your data transfer is green. That’s not how things work.”

The general discussion among attendees following the formal presentations produced little consensus on what should be done to generate better sustainability results. In fact, rather than voicing opinions on the various approaches under consideration, most people simply asked questions or cited green initiative trends in other industries as they sought to get a better understanding of what will work.

But at least the commitment to getting answers appears to be intensifying.

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