Ateme is more frequently dressing its products and strategies in environmentally friendly overalls these days to match the French firm’s long-standing green branding – and its latest sustainable foray does not beat around the bush.
Launching its Green Delivery suite, Ateme pledges that both OTT and DTH operators can significantly crunch carbon emissions produced from video delivery technologies to meet sustainability targets. One thing is certain, these targets are not nearly stringent enough. That will change with time, as governments pile pressure onto the video streaming sector which has become an ever popular punching bag for climate change activists since the emergence of Covid-19. So, getting on board early with something like Ateme’s Green Delivery technology is a way of getting a head start before the rush, even though governments should have acted years ago.
Ateme’s Green Delivery credentials are a little thin on detail, claiming to reduce hardware requirements, bandwidth usage, and energy consumption by collating carbon-efficient components together in a whole package. These include software optimizations for higher-density compression, reduced packaging, and more efficient multiplexing, as well as efficient resource allocation, sharing of hardware resources across applications, and sharing of workflows across services. Ateme even throws its elastic CDN into this sustainably integrated bundle to eliminate the need to build over-capacity, something the vendor inherited via its acquisition of Anevia last year.
The Green Delivery technology isn’t fresh out of the lab either – already achieving success at several operators around the world. Ateme boasts a 66% reduction in energy consumption compared to the 2018 market average, which is pretty impressive, although we don’t have much to run it against given the lack of Green Delivery options from Ateme’s rivals and partners.
Only two months ago we heard from Ateme’s CEO Michelle Artieres, during another of the company’s impressive 24-hour virtual events. When quizzed about where he would invest $100 million today, Artieres said he would inject this cash into pushing for greener technologies. Sensing eyes rolling back into heads throughout Ateme’s customer base, Artieres was careful to catch himself by reiterating that helping customers become more efficient is the focus of any future environmental commitments from Ateme, not in turning back time by reverting to SD only. At the time, while reiterating Ateme’s desire to take care of the planet, he spoke about big plans to deliver 4K and HDR formats, increasingly over 5G networks. This was a prime example of how the video industry is stuck between a rock and a hard place – eager to innovate yet anxious in the knowledge of streaming’s swelling carbon footprint.
Elsewhere in the eco world of video, a recent report from remote video production platform provider Blackbird found that just 1 hour of TV production equates to 9.2 tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere, which is responsible for 27.6m2 of sea ice loss. Online video generates 300 million tons of CO2 a year, accounting for 1% of total global emissions, says Blackbird, citing BBC Future data. That is about to get a whole lot worse, according to the report, as video streaming will surge to dominate the networks at 82% of all internet traffic by 2022.
This is a high priority area that Faultline will be diving into in more detail upon our next routine catch-up with Ateme.