Sustainability in software is a promising, but still unexplored, frontier
How often have you been throwing out worn-out shoes and heard a parents’ voice: ‘You still have loads of wear left in those!’ or as you’re about to turn up the thermostat ‘Why don’t you just put a jumper on?!’ We didn’t know it at the time, but our parents were big proponents of sustainability.
The heart of sustainability is avoiding waste and businesses are coming to the understanding that, far from being about some extra ‘green’ agenda, sustainability just means thrift and careful planning. That also means a better bottom line – alongside the bonus of the human species surviving the next century.
One first principle of sustainability is to avoid moving things whenever you can. Reducing the amount of hardware you need to buy is good for the bottom line, but it also means less energy use and less weight to haul from location to location.
“The broadcasters have a burden that we don’t have as vendors, which is how to implement guidelines like the BAFTA albert protocols to limit the sustainability impact of video production onsite,” says Jeff Poapst, chief manufacturing officer at Ross Video. “Our product line is so varied that contributing to that effort happens on a product-by-product basis.”
In an effort to reduce this sheer mass of gear that broadcasters are using – and often moving around – Ross has the ‘hyperconverged’ concept in which a single piece of gear performs multiple functions. The company’s Hyperconverged Ultrix Platform, which won an Excellence in Sustainability Award at the 2024 NAB Show, allows broadcasters to move functions such as routing, switching, colour correction and multiviewer into software operating on a single piece of hardware. The result is a substantial reduction in power consumption and weight – and the cabling and rack units used to tie it all together.
Lightening up with software
Upgrading to more efficient products isn’t the only answer. Rethinking the workflows themselves and introducing brand new technologies is also an important part of creating a sustainable broadcast industry.
Getting traditional hardware-based processes and physical OB workflows into pure software has become a favourite choice for sports broadcasters trying to reduce their carbon footprint. The European League of Football has made sustainability a priority and with tech partners AWS and Vizrt has committed to a fully cloud workflow until 2026. This is allowing them to broadcast 100 games a season across nine countries with a carbon footprint much lower than traditional workflows.
“The impact of doing remote productions was huge,” says Levon Melikian, managing director of novel media, the ELF’s key tech partner. “We used to have five to six operators every week travelling all over Europe, and a rough calculation suggests we are saving more than 300 tons of carbon dioxide per season.”
Sustainability requires not just better technical solutions, but new ways of thinking about workflows and being willing to redesign what you do.
“One of the biggest hurdles to get over is that in order to really make the workflows more efficient and to use the underlying infrastructure much more efficiently, we need to partly redesign the stack,” says Johan Bolin, chief research and innovation officer at Ateliere Creative Technologies.
Ateliere’s cloud-native solution Ateliere Live aims to reduce the number of steps taken up in video processing in live production, using live proxy vision mixing and collaborative editing. Cloud tools like Ateliere Live allow teams to work remotely, reducing the need to move people and gear among locations. More significantly, the Ateliere Live platform optimises video processing so that video isn’t being constantly moved back and forth across platforms wastefully. Moving electrons can be just as expensive – and wasteful – as moving people and kit.
The cost of moving electrons
But as we move workflows to the cloud and software, cutting away unnecessary physical infrastructure, we need to be careful that we aren’t just sweeping dust under the carpet and saying we’ve cleaned up our act.
Cloud and software still have an energy cost, sometimes quite a big one. And while processors – and the data centres they power – are getting more efficient, our intuitive assumptions about cloud may not always be correct.
There is still a persisting belief, for example, that video compression and bitrate reduction is a way to reduce energy consumption in a video stream. At first glance this seems reasonable. We imagine the network as being like a pipe and that changing bitrate means we are changing the amount of water sent down that pipe.
But in the world of data, the analogy doesn’t hold. In a streaming network, there is always electricity running through the system, whether we are sending video through it or not. The pipes are always full of water as long as they are switched on. We might be able to control the salinity, colour, flavour of that water – in the pipe analogy – but the rate that it flows is unaffected.
Clarifying the role of bitrate was one of the first sallies made by Greening of Streaming in its battle to make video delivery more energy efficient. In the four years since the organisation’s founding, the brain trust of streaming tech companies has discovered that the video delivery infrastructure we have built up is much more complicated than most people at first supposed – and that, because a network is always on whether data is being sent through it or not, video delivery consumes an extraordinary amount of energy.
Greening of Streaming is methodically working its way through the individual components of the delivery chain, concentrating first on the places likely to have the most impact. The group’s most recent focus has been measuring the energy consumption of viewing devices for which there is actually very little data outside the manufacturer’s labs.
The organisation has just submitted a new standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force dubbed EYANG, which is a data model proposal designed to standardise energy measurement across streaming infrastructure – from CDNs and encoders to decoders, routers, and set-top boxes. EYANG defines a YANG data model for collecting both instantaneous power readings with real-time monitoring and correlated streaming metrics to understand energy efficiency in context.
If successful, the new standard could enable the industry to move beyond assumptions towards data-driven sustainability decisions around video delivery. This could go a long way towards helping broadcasters understand to what extent working in cloud really is more sustainable than working on premises. We will be in a better position to test our intuitive assumptions.
Pinpointing your energy use when working with the big cloud hyperscalers is still pretty vague. Though AWS, Google and Azure do provide in house tools, they tend to be inadequate for teams who really want to get an exact measurement of the energy their productions are consuming and, using that data, make sustainable choices.
April 2, 2025 at 03:12PM
https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/sustainability-in-software-is-a-promising-but-still-unexplored-frontier/
Neal Romanek