At last, some encouraging news for sustainability activists in the video technology ecosystem, as a report hot off the press shows that TV devices are making positive progress in power reduction. Will this be enough to hike sustainability considerations back up the pecking order of M&E C-suite agendas? We doubt it.
The top six primary consumer devices for video—TVs, set tops, gaming consoles, smartphones, tablets, and media streamers—have collectively achieved a 17% reduction in annual Terawatt hours (TWh) between 2020 and 2024, reaching a projected 357 TWh at the end of last year.
Better still, a further 12% reduction is predicted by 2028, as legacy video hardware lines are switched out in place of more energy-efficient alternatives.
This is according to The Spotlight on Sustainability report, produced by Futuresource Consulting and commissioned by technology R&D veteran InterDigital. Scratch below the sanctimonious prefacing and vague advice on how to create a greener video value chain, and you will find tidbits of genuine research, most notably on the power consumption of consumer electronics.
Old hands in the sustainability game might argue that measuring the power consumption of various consumer TV devices in differing environments—streaming, OTA, cable, hybrid, HD/UHD, low-power, sports mode etc.—have bene done to death. Yet, with each new paper on power consumption, a faint light is shone on a marginally unique perspective, and lessons are learned from mistakes.
The Futuresource/InterDigital research is particularly flattering for set top manufacturers. While this subset of consumer devices accounted for the second largest overall energy consumption of the six categories, set tops exhibited the highest reduction in energy, at 32% across the last four years.
This is credited in part to the collaborative approach including the set top voluntary agreement signed in 2012, coupled with commitments by OEMs to put sustainability at the core of new hardware designs, to lower energy usage overall.
However, TV sets continue to rain on the set top parade, with TVs alone accounting for 239 TWh in 2024—67% of total energy usage across video entertainment devices.
Another factor in favor of set tops is that the overall installed base for these devices is decreasing. The report acknowledges that the very functionalities that made the set top a staple ancillary device have been subsumed into smart TVs and contemporary media streamer alternatives.
This natural substitution process means that media streamers rank poorly for energy consumption compared to set tops, although the overall picture is positive with a 4% projected decline in annual energy consumption for the measured period from 2020 to 2028.
However, as shown in the first attached graph, media streamers already consume the lowest energy of all six consumer devices, which is an obvious takeaway due to their small-form factor, low compute power, lack of screen, and embedded SoC technology which is already designed to minimize energy consumption.
All this means that improvements in the media streamer department are something of a dead end.
Likewise, gaming consoles have been shown to exhibit the slowest decline in annual energy consumption, at a rate of just 3%. In contrast with CTV devices, these devices demand high compute and performance to deliver premium quality to gamers.
While all fingers point to TVs as power-guzzlers, these primary devices have at least seen a marginal improvement in TWh per year, unlike smartphones, which are the only segment to see an increase in energy consumption—reporting a 27% rise over 2020 levels.
This is due to the demand for larger smartphones with better battery capacity, more storage, and more advanced screen technology. To contextualize, smartphones still represent only 6% of energy usage for video consumption, per the report.
Pivoting to carbon intensity as a KPI, TV sets again lead the pack, together with games consoles, with each accounting for around 23gCO2e (grams of carbon dioxide equivalent) per hour of video.
Futuresource estimates that TV carbon intensity will decline by 13%, and games consoles by 15%, over the next four years, as more energy-efficient devices are produced.
Providing some examples of smart TV manufacturers making progress towards environmental sustainability, the report cites Samsung’s motion-based energy saving mode activation, automated picture brightness adjustment depending upon ambient environment, and fitting remote controls with solar charging capabilities from both sunlight and indoor light.
Sony has similar schemes in the pipeline for its TV portfolio, including viewing sensor to monitor presence, brightness adjustment based on room lighting, energy saving recommendations, and even a monthly TV energy consumption reporting tool called Eco Dashboard.
A slight surprise is a silver lining for the 8K TV camp, with the TV comparison chart for carbon intensity per hour showing that, by 2028, 8K TV sets are projected to reduce kgCO2e per hour to levels almost in line with 4K TVs in 2020.
In turn, 4K TVs are expected to have a lower kgCO2e per hour than HD TVs were producing in 2020.
The report balances its consumer-facing focus with a token gesture for CDNs, highlighting that energy efficiencies lie at the epicenter of these geographically distributed proxy servers. It alludes vaguely to “preconfigured green coding with low-energy streaming protocols” as a field where improved efficiencies are being through the supply chain in the context of CDNs.
Plucking a case study from thin air, the paper credits Spotify for being an early adopter of a multi-CDN approach, claiming that the music streaming service selectively picked energy efficient CDNs hosted in energy efficient data centers pre-embedded with green hosting. Even if a significant proportion of Spotify’s data traffic was video (which it isn’t), this would still be a weak and technically impotent example.
Let’s see if the Sky case study can do any better.
The paper purrs over the European operator’s migration of 200 linear channels, using the Vipe browser-based UI and cloud native architecture from playout vendor BCNexxt. This enabled Sky to dynamically allocate requisite compute and storage based on live processing requirements, rather than rely upon comparatively expensive peak demand-based prerequisite infrastructure investment, according to the report.
The result for Sky in Italy and Germany was a 60% CO2 reduction, primarily from cooling and air conditioning energy efficiencies attributed to reduction in on-premise server footprint.
Wrapping things up, we cannot fault the report for its insights into sustainability in the TV and video industry, yet it suffers from several critical shortcomings that undermine its overall impact.
A lack of specificity in some data and an over-reliance on industry sources limits the robustness of its conclusions, while inconsistent terminology—such as interchangeable references to “carbon emissions,” “GHG emissions,” and “CO2 emissions”—creates confusion.
While this is not attempting to be an academic-grade research paper, the report would benefit from deeper context, such as analyzing the full lifecycle of products and incorporating data from independent or academic sources to balance industry perspectives.