Dom Robinson: “Only the industry has the touch points to evaluate the carbon footprint of the Content Delivery Network”
This year's Mediatech Hub Conference is (also) about green streaming. Dom Robinson, director and co-founder of Greening of Streaming, an interest .
This year's Mediatech Hub Conference is (also) about green streaming. Dom Robinson, director and co-founder of Greening of Streaming, an interest group that brings players from the industry together, will be the speaker. We wanted to know from him: Can streaming be (more) environmentally friendly?
INTERVIEW Boris Messing
CCB Magazine:Streaming is the new television, and streaming services consume a lot of energy. How can the carbon footprint of a streaming service be calculated?
Dom Robinson:A very good question. The industry itself is currently focusing on this, but as a whole there is little to no consensus yet. Early claims in this space have almost entirely come from onlookers, analysts and academics and been extrapolated from ‘lab tests’ on various components or used ‘data attribution’ models but with little real understanding or insight into how services are actually deployed and operated in real world Content Delivery Network and streaming infrastructures. So, any figures making estimates from outside the industry at the moment are not taken seriously by the industry itself.
CCB Magazine:According to a study by the French think tank Shift Project, the Co2 equivalent of video streaming in 2018 was more than 300 million tons. A third of this, according to the study, was due to on-demand services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. Is this a credible figure?
Dom Robinson:The shift report was widely discredited since it not only used ‘data attribution’ models but they had a calculation out between bits and bytes making their results out by a factor of 8. This was corrected by George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency and many others have supported that. Shift themselves corrected this and brought their estimates down considerably. Only the industry has the touch points with the infrastructure to really evaluate such things, and the industry itself is still in the throes of working out how to measure such things. The one figure we tend to accept is that about 3% of world energy is being used by Information and Communication Technology, and with Cisco and others estimating that 70-80% of all network traffic is now video streaming. We at Greening of Streaming talk about streaming ‘probably’ requiring between 1% and 2% of World Energy.
The one figure we tend to accept is that about 3% of world energy is being used by Information and Communication Technology, and with Cisco and others estimating that 70-80% of all network traffic is now video streaming
CCB Magazine:What are the most promising measures and ideas to make streaming less CO2-intensive?
Dom Robinson:Even if the entire Information and Communication Technology industry moved to renewable energy we, as engineers, seek to be better energy citizens so our infrastructures do not consume ‘all’ the renewables, leaving energy available for other critical uses such as heating and refrigeration. That said we have key focus working groups investigating a move of thinking from ‘bandwidth’ to ‘infrastructure availability’ – the latter is actually what is consuming the energy. Energy is not (despite most thinking) relating to usage of infrastructure; it is actually being consumed in the provisioning and making available of infrastructure. In simple terms ‘everything is provisioned for peak all the time’ – so this means that Service Level Agreements along the supply chains are hugely impacting and are the immediately low hanging fruit for making significant change.
CCB Magazine:Who plays the most important role in reducing emissions from streaming: users or providers?
Dom Robinson:Absolutely 100% the providers. We have a range of surveys we completed with the public and announced in our UK Parliament event this summer, that highlight that while there is increasing awareness in the consumer, they are almost entirely unable to do a...
This year's Mediatech Hub Conference is (also) about green streaming. Dom Robinson, director and co-founder of Greening of Streaming, an interest group that brings players from the industry together, will be the speaker. We wanted to know from him: Can streaming be (more) environmentally friendly?
INTERVIEW Boris Messing
CCB Magazine:Streaming is the new television, and streaming services consume a lot of energy. How can the carbon footprint of a streaming service be calculated?
Dom Robinson:A very good question. The industry itself is currently focusing on this, but as a whole there is little to no consensus yet. Early claims in this space have almost entirely come from onlookers, analysts and academics and been extrapolated from ‘lab tests’ on various components or used ‘data attribution’ models but with little real understanding or insight into how services are actually deployed and operated in real world Content Delivery Network and streaming infrastructures. So, any figures making estimates from outside the industry at the moment are not taken seriously by the industry itself.
CCB Magazine:According to a study by the French think tank Shift Project, the Co2 equivalent of video streaming in 2018 was more than 300 million tons. A third of this, according to the study, was due to on-demand services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. Is this a credible figure?
Dom Robinson:The shift report was widely discredited since it not only used ‘data attribution’ models but they had a calculation out between bits and bytes making their results out by a factor of 8. This was corrected by George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency and many others have supported that. Shift themselves corrected this and brought their estimates down considerably. Only the industry has the touch points with the infrastructure to really evaluate such things, and the industry itself is still in the throes of working out how to measure such things. The one figure we tend to accept is that about 3% of world energy is being used by Information and Communication Technology, and with Cisco and others estimating that 70-80% of all network traffic is now video streaming. We at Greening of Streaming talk about streaming ‘probably’ requiring between 1% and 2% of World Energy.
The one figure we tend to accept is that about 3% of world energy is being used by Information and Communication Technology, and with Cisco and others estimating that 70-80% of all network traffic is now video streaming
CCB Magazine:What are the most promising measures and ideas to make streaming less CO2-intensive?
Dom Robinson:Even if the entire Information and Communication Technology industry moved to renewable energy we, as engineers, seek to be better energy citizens so our infrastructures do not consume ‘all’ the renewables, leaving energy available for other critical uses such as heating and refrigeration. That said we have key focus working groups investigating a move of thinking from ‘bandwidth’ to ‘infrastructure availability’ – the latter is actually what is consuming the energy. Energy is not (despite most thinking) relating to usage of infrastructure; it is actually being consumed in the provisioning and making available of infrastructure. In simple terms ‘everything is provisioned for peak all the time’ – so this means that Service Level Agreements along the supply chains are hugely impacting and are the immediately low hanging fruit for making significant change.
CCB Magazine:Who plays the most important role in reducing emissions from streaming: users or providers?
Dom Robinson:Absolutely 100% the providers. We have a range of surveys we completed with the public and announced in our UK Parliament event this summer, that highlight that while there is increasing awareness in the consumer, they are almost entirely unable to do a...
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