IBC2024 Accelerator Project: ECOFLOW

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How can we make processing, streaming and the consumption of media more sustainable? That’s the question posed by the ECOFLOW: Energy-Conserving Optimization for Future-ready, Low-impact Online Workflows project, proposed by Humans Not Robots and Accedo.tv, with support from Champions ITV and BBC.

The project tackles the environmental impact of media consumption by developing consolidated metrics for energy usage at major steps of the end-to-end technology supply chain, aligning best-of-breed energy-saving features into a unified user experience. It will essentially determine and demonstrate opportunities to make processing, streaming and media consumption more measurable and sustainable.

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Kristan Bullett, Humans Not Robots

As Kristan Bullett, CEO of, Humans Not Robots, explains: “If you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it.

“Measurement of power and environmental impact is extremely challenging. We are building on the activities of organisations doing live streaming and putting a framework in place that allows cross-organisation understanding and ensuring we’re using the right tools and the right measurement techniques so that we have confidence in those metrics. And, more importantly, not just being an engineering problem, but enabling the executive teams to articulate the environmental impact to the industry. And, of course, very importantly, allowing end consumers to understand what that means as well.”

Watch now Webinar: Measuring and reducing the footprint of streaming workflows

ECOFLOW will measure the energy performance of certain key elements of the content supply chain such as CDNs, encoding, transcoding and advertising delivery to create a base measurement. With this base as a starting point, Champions will test proposed power-saving features to determine the impact within the broader supply chain.

POC objectives include: demonstrating that the industry can measure production workloads; explaining the current state-of-play for preferred measurement guidance; providing a consolidated view (i.e. signposting) of what is happening across the industry in relation to bodies, member organisations, ecosystem, sustainability initiatives and aspirations; creating a map or state of the union of where the industry “is” in relation to sustainability and highlight the challenges of understanding what sustainability means to the industry; enabling broadcasters to quickly implement, test, use and compare energy-saving features; and evaluate the impact of features on user behaviour, and the likelihood for users to use features to make energy-saving choices.

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Tim Davis, ITV

Tim Davis, Principal Enterprise Architect at ITV, a key figure in the project, elaborates: “The ECOFLOW project has three key goals. The first is to drive forward the measurement of energy usage for streaming services, contributing to the body of knowledge and reducing uncertainty about the carbon impact of services. The second is to implement real-world improvements to lower energy usage in tangible and measurable ways. Finally, we need to share our findings with the IBC audience, levelling up the knowledge and information in our industry and adding momentum to the push towards Net Zero.”

Not-so-green screens

The media industry is responsible for a significant portion of global CO2 emissions. This environmental impact is partly driven by the energy consumption of streaming services and devices. During the pitch for the project at the Accelerator Kick-off event, François Polarczyk, Sustainability Director at Accedo.tv, pointed out the industry’s challenge: “There is a huge amount of environmental impact from streaming services and devices,” he said. “Depending on the source, media services are responsible for 3% to 4% of global CO2 emissions. While there are numerous individual efforts to address this, there is a lack of a unified approach to effectively measure and reduce this impact.”

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François Polarczyk, Accedo.tv

Bullett highlights the project’s unique approach: “The ECOFLOW project differs from other solutions by bringing together OTT vendors, broadcasters, and industry organisations to understand how to measure power consumption across the supply chain and to evaluate the impact of changes,” he says. “Our goal is to educate the industry on who is doing what, where the success stories are, and where there is misdirection or greenwashing.”

ECOFLOW goals

The project’s primary goal is to measure and reduce the energy consumption of streaming services and devices. It aims to create a base measurement of energy performance for key elements of the content supply chain, such as CDN, encoding, transcoding, and advertising delivery. By establishing this baseline, the project will test proposed power-saving features to determine their impact within the broader supply chain.

“The primary goal of ECOFLOW is to bring attention to the challenges of sustainability in the context of OTT, broadcasters and industry organisations,” explains Bullett.

Davis adds: “This will help broadcasters quickly implement, test, and compare energy-saving features and evaluate their impact on user behaviour.”

Unique approach and technological integration

ECOFLOW’s approach is distinctive due to its emphasis on collaboration and real-world application. The project brings together a diverse group of participants, including technology suppliers, industry bodies, knowledge partners, and content owners, to develop and test energy-saving features.

Davis highlights the collaborative nature of the project: “There are a few different initiatives that are ongoing across our industry, and the goal of the ECOFLOW project is to support and amplify their efforts,” he says. “Both Greening of Streaming and DIMPACT are active members of the project, representing the current best level of knowledge and action across our industry. The unique factor of ECOFLOW is the bias for action; building, testing and validating the real-world impact of changes.”

Elaborating on the project’s unique approach, Bullett says: “Various industry bodies and member organisations are looking at this problem from their own respective corners,” he says. “As part of ECOFLOW, we are bringing these different perspectives together to provide a common view. What this will not be, at this time, is a holistic view. We know there are many unknowns in this area and we expect to highlight these, but do not expect to understand these yet. This project is unique in bringing together minds and technology from across the spectrum of the industry.”

Participants

The success of ECOFLOW relies on the expertise and collaboration of various stakeholders in the media industry.

“We bring together the collective skills and knowledge of industry bodies with Fraunhofer, Greening of Streaming, DiMPACT, EBU, IET; broadcasters ITV, BBC and RTL; and sustainability focussed vendors including Humans Not Robots, Accedo, Akamai, Cognizant, Bitmovin and Quanteec,” says Bullett.

According to Davis, this large group of participants will be key to the project’s success. “All IBC Accelerator challenges are collaborative, bringing together expertise, resources and knowledge from across the different parts of our industry, and ECOFLOW is no different,” he says. “We’ve chosen to limit the scope initially to encoding, CDN and TV screens, as we feel that’s the way we can make the most impact. Our participants include technology suppliers, industry bodies, knowledge partners and content owners, giving us breadth across different parts of the supply chain. The one area that we are most lacking is consumer electronics manufacturers, so a key objective of the show is to gain some more traction in that area.”

Showcase at IBC

The culmination of the ECOFLOW project will be showcased at IBC2024, where the team will demonstrate their findings and advancements. The showcase will include a demo app that tests energy efficiency features in a repeatable and structured way, providing insights into how specific features impact energy usage.

Davis highlights the importance of the showcase: “We’ve built a demo app that allows us to test energy efficiency features in a repeatable and structured way, so a lot of our goals revolve around taking people through that and helping tell the story of how certain features impact energy usage.”

Bullett adds: “In the context of IBC, we are focussed on delivering an understanding and educating the market on two key pieces. First, the media supply chain, focussing on major costs including distribution. Secondly, showing end consumers what technologies and techniques are available to reduce the power consumption exhibited by the current generation of smart TVs.”

ECOFLOW represents a significant step forward in addressing the environmental impact of media consumption. The collaboration of industry stakeholders and the real-world application of proposed solutions will help ensure that ECOFLOW has a lasting impact on the media industry.

“From an innovation perspective, we are putting telemetry and measurement processes in place so we can clearly and accurately measure what is happening from an environmental perspective across the supply chain,” Bullett concludes. “And all of that ultimately results in a test lab with the capability to look at, and make changes within the environment. We educate customers on how changing variables within the supply chain affect the environmental impact, so we as an industry can understand what it is. And then we can start to address it.”