While no stranger to finger pointing from environmental activist groups, the media and entertainment industry has become an easy target after a year of explosive growth – piling pressure on technology companies powering our streaming experiences to make sweeping green commitments.
Climate-friendly streaming is poised to blow up as a growth area over the next decade. However, while Faultline is an advocate for reducing carbon footprints, we still believe certain people are barking up the wrong tree by scapegoating streaming as one of the biggest problems facing the future of our planet. There are far bigger demons at play here, for which you can head over to our sister service Rethink Energy for the gory details. But sticking strictly to the Faultline remit, we believe the entertainment ecosystem has an opportunity to set a precedent for advancements in sustainable technologies.
Our interest was piqued by a report pushed out in the past week by video production vendor Blackbird, whose 2020 growth we have followed with interest. It begins just like any other sustainability report – a polar bear and melting ice caps decorate the front page, backed up by environmental data that will chill you to the bone. We expected better than a cheap cliché from Blackbird.
The numbers designed to shock are indeed a concern. Blackbird says 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.
But, more importantly, does it cut through the scaremongering by offering up actual or potential resolutions to this obvious problem? Namedropping heavyweights like Netflix, YouTube, and Sky as trendsetters in committing to carbon reductions is as good a place as any to start but, in our view, is the easy option. This was a missed chance to explore the bleeding edge of green technologies emerging from start-up communities, tracking investments from the top down.
Getting to the crux of the matter, the real vested interest for Blackbird in commissioning such a report is the push for cleaner video production via cloud video production. It claims performing editing and post-production workflows in the cloud has significant green credentials, by reducing truck roll and equipment required on site. However, this is something of a tradeoff, because running cloud-based workflows requires more internet capacity, more data, and therefore more energy. The report acknowledges that shifting from physical infrastructure to virtual servers and processors in cloud-based environments, despite their efficiencies, is still a model that consumes a lot of energy. To this end, the report claims new technologies have emerged to achieve the same results as cloud-based systems without extra hardware or even virtual infrastructure.
One way to migrate to the cloud in a more sustainable way is to use fully cloud-native technologies, specifically software that can compress large video files down to a manageable level for production in the cloud without sizable storage or processing capacity, something like Blackbird’s platform that transcodes video from live camera feeds.
Being browser-based reduces the need for customers to run extra equipment, all in all making Blackbird’s cloud-native technology a credible choice for reducing energy consumption, while of course making cost savings from the customer’s point of view.
But what does it mean by fully cloud-native? The report defines cloud-native as editors working remotely on regular laptops, without any additional physical or virtual hardware. Cloud-based, on the other hand, defines editors working remotely while requiring extra routers or computer hardware to access cloud systems, plus virtual servers and processing machines to edit and publish. Then comes the on-premise approach which speaks for itself and has the largest carbon footprint.
In fact, for a two-week long sports event, Blackbird claims on-premise production churns out 11 times more emissions than either cloud-native or cloud-based systems. Confusingly, this suggests cloud-native and cloud-based were on par in this particular case study, contradicting Blackbird’s argument for cloud-native systems being more energy efficient.
However, Blackbird then addresses this by claiming that during a one-day production, its own emissions were less than half of the cloud-based model. This apparently widened over a two-week period, with the cloud-based system producing 6 times more carbon than Blackbird, due to more data and more hardware.
The headline is that, in this example, Blackbird generated 91% less CO2 compared to an on-premise workflow for a two-week sports event, as the graph below demonstrates.
Crunching the numbers using annual public sector production hours sourced from UK regulator Ofcom, Blackbird has calculated that a 25% reduction of carbon emissions from the programming of all UK public service broadcasters would save over 200,000m2 of sea ice every year.
An important takeaway is that hybrid models will never be as efficient as cloud-native technologies, which are optimized for cloud environments.
We should remember that sustainability is a word thrown around as an excuse to greenlight the perpetuation of a problem. It allows people to continue bad practices by making small tweaks that are often impossible to regulate or enforce. The plus side of bringing sustainable options to media and entertainment technology, is that very little goes unnoticed. However, regulation at the highest level is the only way to avoid disaster.