Name any trend or technology in the entire media and entertainment industry where you could sit four people around a table, each with their own unique expertise in engineering and business strategies, and get them to mutually agree that zero progress has been made over the past year.
We reckon you’d struggle, with the exception of a discussion on driving more sustainable business and engineering practices in the delivery and consumption of video content.
This was the early conclusion during Faultline’s first live webinar panel of 2023, which you can watch back in full for free here, or keep reading for a more compact summary. The bittersweet honesty of our four panelists embodies the industry’s love/hate relationship with the sustainability debate – that there is so much debating left to be done, ever since serious conversations sparked into life circa 2019, that hardly anything practical has been achieved whatsoever at an energy-reduction level.
Covering substantial ground – from cloud hyperscalers and encoding, to CPE and CDNs – Faultline’s sustainability in streaming panel was a fiery affair, to say the least.
The BBC’s Mohit Arora, Lead R&D Engineer for Sustainable Engineering, butted horns with Open Broadcast Systems’ Founder and CEO Kieran Kunhya, on the extent of the BBC’s power-guzzling legacy infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Accedo’s Bleuenn Le Goffic, VP Strategy and Business Development, took issue with the romanticizing of Dom Robinson, Founder of Greening of Streaming, about a world where emissions are not classified into neat little scopes labeled 1, 2, 3.
And that’s before we include the intense interaction with audience Q&A. Even audience questions that at times bordered on heckling served as refreshing reminders that people in the industry are, if anything else, deeply passionate about this topic.
A few comments worth immortalizing on the pages of Faultline include Robinson’s insights from recent discussions with a group building second-hand cloud infrastructure.
This unnamed start-up is grabbing hold of open compute platform technologies that have been retired by hyperscalers and putting them into a brand new fabric. While a great idea to reduce landfill, Robinson – ever the arbitrator – admitted that the counter argument is that putting less efficient kit into the cloud could be considered less green, depending on which way you skin it.
The overwhelming point, however, is that hyperscalers are not very efficient at supporting energy-intensive hardware, such as FPGAs and GPUs. So, the idea from this mystery second-hand cloud upcycler is to use older compute platforms in a lightweight way that is not CPU-intensive in terms of transcoding, because resources can be offloaded onto modern FPGAs that normally you would not be able to connect in an open compute platform running on the infrastructure of a modern hyperscaler.
On this note, we inadvertently discovered during the webinar that the revered BBC R&D department is no longer an active member of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), the industry consortium pushing the AV1 codec. The BBC’s Arora could not confirm when and why the UK broadcaster exited AOM, after first signing up in 2016, which is perhaps a story to pick up for a rainy day.
Meanwhile, Arora – who came away mostly unscathed from Kunhya’s baiting – believes that 8K does not have a place in any home, alluding to the likely legislation that will pass banning 8K TV sales across Europe.
It is true that pockets of 8K advocates remain, but we feel that with the sustainability microscope intensifying, support is waning. Our panelists mostly agreed that few consumers can tell the difference between a 4K screen or 8K without being told, and even fewer care.
It comes as the Greening of Streaming officially lifted the lid on its LESS (Low Energy Sustainable Streaming) Accord this week. This is effectively about inviting argument, to gauge whether the idea for energy-optimized encoding with a minimum quality benchmark has any legs, and to encourage additional ideas. Once arguments evolve into a framework, Robinson hopes these will roll-out later this year. You never know, by this time next year, there might even be some practical results to show for it.
Continuing the encoding conversation, Kunhya of Open Broadcast Systems – the only dedicated encoding company in the room – naturally believes that encoding gets a bad rap. Kunhya was also steadfast that the cloud providers are convenient greenwashing dispensers for broadcasters to distract from investing in replacing highly inefficient equipment.
“There is value to what encoding does. The issue is the massive long-tail of very low view-count content. Many organizations use the same pipeline whether a million people watch something or five people watch it. That’s an issue. Netflix spends weeks encoding a movie and there probably is value in that,” commented Kunhya.
As a company whose total emissions are 97% accounted for by scope 3 (supply chain emissions), there is not much more Swedish UX developer Accedo can do to reduce its scope 1 and 2 emissions. Le Goffic credited two organizations during the webinar, firstly – and predictably – is AWS, and the second – a new name on our radar – is Purpose Disruptors.
“I advise you to look into Purpose Disruptors. I find the work fantastic and a bit scary,” confessed Le Goffic.
Purpose Disruptors is a group on a mission to kick advertising into touch – as an industry that perpetuates the culture of consumerism. The group, which was born in a UK pub, has introduced a new metric to measure Advertised Emissions, together with econometrics agency Magic Numbers, and is producing reports to help the advertising industry take responsibility.
Le Goffic emphasizes that a sustainable business model doesn’t mean just being green. It also means being financially durable. Accedo is building on the efforts of Purpose Disruptors with an IBC Accelerator project on the transition to a greener advertising system, which we are hoping to sneak a glimpse of before IBC 2023 in September.
“When you talk to a broadcaster and you say it might need to remove some ads, you are telling it to remove part of revenues – that just doesn’t fly. So we need to look at where advertising should aim to be? We’re inviting tech vendors and content providers into the project to experiment with audiences on how to transition to greener advertising business models. The only way to accelerate doing is by experimenting,” explains Le Goffic.