id3as' Dom Robinson and Help Me Stream's Tim Siglin discuss the latest Greening of Streaming developments--including taking the conservation case to .

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id3as' Dom Robinson and Help Me Stream's Tim Siglin Talk Greening of Streaming

Tim Siglin: Welcome to our final interview for Streaming Media East 2022 here in Boston. I've got with me Dom Robinson, who has a shirt on that says id3as [http://id3as.com]. That is his company, but we're actually gonna talk about something else today. Dom and I wrote an article called The Greening of Streaming []. In that article, Eric asked us to take a look at the efficiencies as we talked about pricing performance before. And out of that has led to sort of a movement with Greening of Streaming. So, so just let's recap briefly the Greening of Streaming journey.

Dom Robinson: So we wrote the article Greening of Streaming. I thought the name was a catchy catchy phrase, registered the domain, stuck an email catch-all at the back of the domain name, and then at the last four virtual Content Delivery Summits before this week--which I was helping run for Streaming Media--we started the conversation with the industry asking where people's mindsets were at with issues around sustainability, in terms of the energy we are using within all the technologies that we're streaming with.

Tim Siglin: And as a matter of fact, just to interject real quick, I went back and watched part of that Fireside Chat at CDS. And at the end of it, you said to people tell us what you know about greening and power efficiency, because we're a bit naive to the language on it. And obviously, one of the things that we've had to do is figure out what the language is around around that.

Dom Robinson: Certainly, when we were doing the research, the estimation of the reports, they were wildly all over the place, the terminology, what's per frame, kilograms of carbon per hour--all really, really different to come to any consensus about what anyone in the industry was talking about. And in fact, I think until we started asking the questions, everyone was saying, "I don't know, it's the finance director's decision. He buys the green electrons." And it was left there. So once we started the conversation, these bigger companies--Akamai and Intel stand out--went out and really started to drill into their sustainability story. And so by the second and third Content Delivery Summit, we were starting to get panels. We were starting to get the discussion going. One of the premises you mentioned a second ago that we put forward was this idea that, the CDN industry in particular spent the first 10, 15 years of its life focused on price.

We forget that--we think it's all about performance because in the more recent decade it's all been about performance. But the first decade was all about making it affordable to you to get high-capacity content or high-data rate content.

Tim Siglin: And as a matter of fact, if you'd have large audiences like we have today, your company who was using the CDN services would be out of business, because it couldn't afford to pay the bill.

Dom Robinson: Exactly. So we spent more than a decade actually focused on getting it to work affordably so that you could then launch models where people could say, "Oh, I haven't got the quality I want." So then we spent another decade getting the quality to the point where it was good enough that the consumer opted in. But nobody had ever thought about the power efficiency. So in the last two years with CDS that conversation's firmly begun, and Greeting of Streaming as a catch-all email group grew. And so we decided to proposition that community to come together to have a full-day online event talking about this, which we did last September. But as momentum for that was coming together, we realized that there was going to be critical mass to create a trade association. So that was essentially our launch event.

Tim Sig...

The UK’s Channel 4 has extended its strategic partnership with YouTube in what is the first deal of its kind across the UK and Europe. It will make .

The UK’s Channel 4 has extended its strategic partnership with YouTube in what is the first deal of its kind across the UK and Europe.

It will make hundreds of hours of programmes available on YouTube in the UK/Eire and enable Channel 4 to sell its own advertising around these shows.

According to Channel 4, the new deal represents a major step in its digital transformation as it continues to make significant strides against its five-year Future4 strategy to accelerate digital growth, reach young audiences where they enjoy watching content, increase new revenue streams, and build strategic partnerships to compete more effectively.

The partnership with YouTube, which is used by 98% of online 18-34-year-olds each month, will make 1,000 hours of full Channel 4 and E4 episodes from new and popular series available to watch across Channel 4’s YouTube network by the end of 2022, with content starting to roll out from this month.

Additionally, the partnership will enable Channel 4 to generate new revenues and support the broadcaster’s ambition to scale the Channel 4 brand on the platform. This includes the creation of a dedicated YouTube team within Channel 4’s commercial arm 4Sales, to enable Channel 4 to directly sell advertising around its content on the platform.

Commenting on the partnership, Alex Mahon, chief executive of Channel 4, said: “Innovative strategic partnerships are Channel 4’s speciality, and this new relationship with YouTube is another which will ensure we continue to keep growing our reach with young audiences and build on our unrivalled digital success.

“Together with YouTube we have created a powerful consumer channel full of our brilliant Channel 4 content. This will engage even more viewers through the enhanced reach and digital scale of YouTube, combined with the dynamism of the Channel 4 brand”.

Ben McOwen Wilson, MD YouTube, UK and Ireland, added: “I’m proud to welcome Channel 4’s creative, thought-provoking long form content on to the YouTube platform.

“As an open platform, YouTube is where UK audiences of all ages and backgrounds come to watch what they want to watch, when they want to watch it. It is fantastic to drive innovative partnerships such as this, to enable leading broadcasters to contribute to the diversity of content on the platform of choice for young viewers”.

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Western Digital has unveiled its new 22TB CMR and 26TB UltraSMR hard disk drives (HDDs) which are now being tested by select hyperscale cloud .

Western Digital has unveiled its new 22TB CMR and 26TB UltraSMR hard disk drives (HDDs) which are now being tested by select hyperscale cloud customers.

The reason the storage giant has been able to significantly expand the capacity of HDDs over the years is due to its ever expanding technology portfolio which includes its unique OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR), triple-stage actuator (TSA), HelioSeal and now UltraSMR.

Western Digital’s new ePMR drives leverage the company’s OptiNAND technology to unlock higher levels of capacity, performance and data resiliency. For instance, its new 22TB CMR HDD incorporates OptiNAND to deliver areal density on a 2.2TB/platter HelioSeal platform with ten disks.

While the average consumer likely doesn’t have a need for such a high capacity drive, cloud computing providers and other tech giants can use Western Digital’s HDDs to store more data in less space which could help bring down the cost of cloud storage services for end users.

UltraSMR

By combining OptiNAND with proprietary firmware that leverages HDD system-level hardware advancements, Western Digital’s new UltraSMR technology introduces large block encoding with an advanced error correction algorithm that increases track-per-inch (TPI) to enable higher capacity HDDs.

The first HDD to use this new technology is the company’s new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD that features 2.6TB per platter and offers 18 percent more storage capacity. However, as cloud service providers are increasingly adding SMR to their datacenter roadmaps, the drive’s 26TB capacity could serve as a tipping point to accelerate adoption.

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EVP and GM of Western Digital’s HDD Business Unit, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla provided further insight on the company’s HDD technology portfolio in a press release, saying:

“As a longstanding partner of the industry’s leading cloud providers, we understand their unique requirements in building next-generation cloud infrastructure and invested in several HDD innovations we developed alongside our areal density technology. Our intent with taking this development strategy was not only to address the capacity demands of the world’s largest cloud titans but to deliver on a roadmap that would also support the evolving economics of their data centers for decades to come. With ePMR, OptiNAND and now UltraSMR as the foundation of Western Digital’s HDD roadmap, our cloud customers can continue rapidly scaling their business by taking advantage of our innovations to lower their storage TCO.”

The 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD will soon begin volume shipments to the channel while the 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD is set to begin shipping to select customers this summer.

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Arianna has helped with the deep 'plumbing' of many of the worlds largest CDNs and Shraddha has experience spanning Telco and Broadcast.

Live on the first Thursday of each month at 5pm UK / 12noon ET / 9am PT - on www.smadvancedforum.com - Informal chat and opinions on the business and technology of streaming.

Streaming platforms are set to be regulated like linear broadcasters for the first time, under the UK Government’s new plans, set out in a ‘White .

Streaming platforms are set to be regulated like linear broadcasters for the first time, under the UK Government’s new plans, set out in a ‘White Paper’ policy document revealed this week.

The UK regulator Ofcom, which currently monitors content on network television, will be responsible for applying and enforcing guidelines on Netflix, Disney+ and other streamers, which aren’t currently subject to the Broadcasting Code.

The changes would require video on demand services to ensure their audiences are protected from harmful or offensive material, and that principles of fairness, accuracy and privacy are all applied.

The White Paper outlines possible fines for breaking the Code, with any errant VoD services liable to pay £250,000 or a figure up to 5% of the organisation’s revenue, whichever is the higher amount.

Linear broadcasters have been pushing for these guidelines to be applied to streamers for several years. Netflix responded to the proposal, saying they welcome measures to update the legal framework.

The streamer asserted: “We look forward to reviewing the White Paper’s other proposals and continuing to engage with the government on their plans.”

The policy document also included plans to privatise Channel 4, currently owned by the government and paid for by advertising. This project has come in for widespread criticism across the British television industry, but the Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has stuck to her line that the sale will help the channel thrive in the modern era, and that the money raised will be invested back into the television production sector.

In response to the increasing growth of the cloud streaming industry, Google LLC today announced the general availability of Media CDN, a content .

In response to the increasing growth of the cloud streaming industry, Google LLC today announced the general availability of Media CDN, a content distribution platform that can handle the delivery of immersive media at a massive scale.

Using Media CDN, media and entertainment customers will be able to deliver streaming experiences across the globe. It is built for customers with huge amounts of streaming content that need high bandwidth and low-latency user experiences.

Shailesh Shukla, vice president of networking at Google Cloud, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that Media CDN’s foundational advantage is Google’s network. It uses the same infrastructure that Google has developed for YouTube to deliver video to over 2 billion users, which is now being scaled up globally for Google Cloud customers.

“As we’ve seen through the pandemic and before it has been experiencing dramatic growth,” Shukla said. “Audiences are moving to digital experiences and content providers want to deliver digital media on a global scale. Streaming video now accounts for more than 54% of the total internet bandwidth, which has increased dramatically over the past few years.”

To keep up with this demand, Google has invested resources in building out its content delivery network. That allows providers to cache content closer to their users by having a presence in more than 200 countries and 1,300 cities around the world. By putting the content being delivered closer to the users requesting the video, it lowers the latency, enabling higher bitrates and reducing buffering needs, which results in a superior experience, especially on mobile devices.

Anyone who watches a lot of video on the internet has probably encountered long waits while a video “queues up” its buffer or suddenly stalls while playing. A spinning indicator appears and the play bar at the bottom stops while the gray unplayed section trails out further. That’s the video buffering itself so that it can play through without stopping, which can happen a lot if there’s low bandwidth or high latency.

For developers and businesses, Media CDN is delivered as “infrastructure as code” and designed to be as extensible as possible using a software-defined approach. As a result, it uses a comprehensive set of application programming interfaces and support for automation tools such as Terraform. This allows customers to define their own cloud network tooling and operations to match their own specific needs.

Such needs could include minimizing calls to origin servers for content in order to reduce capacity and performance stress. For example, Media CDN offers multiple tiers of caching across the globe to allow cost savings for commonly streamed media files that can be offloaded from centralized servers.

U-Next, a popular Japanese entertainment streaming platform, recently implemented and configured Media CDN to speed up and optimize traffic flow for its streaming video. According to the company, it needed a content delivery network with a high cache rate and low latency.

“Google Cloud’s Media CDN helps us efficiently scale our infrastructure, which is challenging with a vast library of content,” said Rutong Li, chief technology officer at U-Next. “Media CDN offloaded 98.3% of requests from our origin server while delivering consistent great quality.”

Another important element of Media CDN’s suite of tools is integration with Google’s vast array of analytics tools. It also includes detailed metrics for playback tracing, real-time visibility and performance diagnostics. Visibility into the network is available through Google Cloud’s operations suite, and Media CDN also has a set of APIs that allow it to connect to external analytics services such as Grafana or ElasticSearch.

“Media CDN is modern, meaning that it is cloud-native and developer-friendly,” said S...

M&E Industry Getting Serious About Sustainability M&E Industry Getting Serious About Sustainability M&E Industry Getting Serious About .

OTTAWA—Tech companies in the media and entertainment (M&E) industry are making their business and production practices more sustainable by reducing their impact on the environment and contributions to climate change.

“The video industry is taking the ‘green initiative’ seriously,” said Thierry Fautier, vice president of strategy for Harmonic. “It has set a target and is now working toward achieving its goals. We have seen operators targeting zero carbon emission by 2040. There is also a new industry forum called ‘Greening of Streaming’ that is addressing greener video delivery.”

This last sustainability effort is particularly important, as “video traffic represented an estimated 84% of all consumer IP traffic in 2021 (up from 79% in 2016) according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index,” said Alain Nochimowski, CTO at the OTT/TV platform solutions company Viaccess-Orca. “Fortunately, the industry is starting to understand that it will need to take proactive steps toward being greener.”

Real Companies, Tangible Actions Across the M&E industry, specific companies and organizations are taking tangible steps to make themselves and the industry as a whole more sustainable. They include video delivery provider Ateme, live video contribution tech provider Aviwest, SDVI and IBC, among many others.

Given the billions of daily viewers of streaming services, reducing its environmental impact is a gigantic task.

“The largest source of power consumption for video services is the device, followed by the network and then the data center,” Fautier said. “Some work has already been done on the device side with smart power management schemes deployed and regulations looking at limiting the display consumption. On the network side, the move to 5G is aimed at drastically reducing the watt-per-bit cost; reports show that cloud infrastructure is more power-efficient than a classical on-premises infrastructure approach.”

Harmonic is enhancing its video compression algorithms to reduce traffic levels on IP networks, thus cutting the amount of electricity needed to deliver video content.

“We are doing this by using AI-based encoding techniques such as content-aware encoding [CAE], dynamic frame-rate encoding [DFE] and dynamic resolution encoding [DRE] to improve legacy codecs; also AVC mostly but also HEVC,” said Fautier.

The company is also promoting new, more efficient codecs such as AV1 and VVC, plus the LCEVC (low complexity enhancement video encoding) “intermediate solution” that combines legacy equipment and new approaches “to enable a significant savings in bandwidth and processing power,” he said.

Use of the cloud is critical to meeting such goals. “Harmonic is 100% committed to cloud,” added Fautier. The company is also asking OTT content providers to consider using power-efficient multicasting in place of unicasting, bearing in mind that doing so would reduce delivery flexibility for consumers.

One Stream for a Million Requests Content delivery solutions provider Broadpeak says its multicast adaptive bitrate (MABR) distribution product is a practical way to address unicasting’s (one-to-one) high network usage.

“Without multicast ABR, if a million people are streaming the same content at the same time, there are one million active connections requiring ad-hoc capacity throughout the network and consuming power accordingly,” said Yann Begassat, Broadpeak’s business development manager. “With multicast ABR, there is only one stream to address the million requests, dramatically reducing capacity needs and energy consumption.”

SDVI’s Rally media supply chain management platform is helping users such as A&E Networks, Comcast, Discovery, Sky, ViacomCBS, and WarnerMedia manage their end-to-end video assets in a more efficient (and thus more sustainable) manner.

“For our part, we have committed to a new sustaina...

On the one hand, streaming quality has improved as network bandwidth continues to increase and viewing devices become capable of playing out at .

On the one hand, streaming quality has improved as network bandwidth continues to increase and viewing devices become capable of playing out at higher resolutions, while at the same time there are continued innovations around immersive audio, 360 degrees viewing, and the various forms of Extend Reality (XR). The BBC, as the event’s broadcaster, is charged with blending those components to deliver a compelling experience both to fans around the site seeking either to watch more distant gigs or obtain closer alternative views, and to remote streamers. The impact of continued 5G roll out around the UK will also be of interest, given that the last Glastonbury 2019 staged before the pandemic was billed as the first 5G festival by UK mobile operator EE, a subsidiary of telco BT.

Another question will be to what extent innovations in online streaming of music that were driven or accelerated by the absence of physical events during the pandemic will carry over to live coverage now such events are returning. With the long standing and ultimately deep decline in revenues from sales of their songs or productions on physical media, many musicians and bands had come to rely on live performing for the bulk of their income. It is true that some revenues could be derived from streaming via platforms such as Spotify or YouTube, but these were usually miniscule compared with proceeds from sales of CDs in the past, or vinyl records before that. Spotify typically paid under half of a cent per stream, so that an artist would earn $1 from around 250 instances and would require 5 million a year to sustain a relatively modest living.

During the pandemic though progress was made adding value to streams and there was also an acceptance by some fans that they should pay more for watching their favourite bands online just to keep them afloat. For musicians, streaming via OTT video and social media platforms was often the only way of maintaining contact with their fans. Then as social distancing rules eased, events started to make a partial come back via drive-in gigs among various inventions, supported by live streaming.

By the time Glastonbury 2022 starts on Wednesday June 22nd, there will have been a number of physical music events to serve as templates and inspirations for the broadcast and streaming coverage. It is not surprising then that the BBC has declined to give specific details of its streaming coverage until the beginning of that month.

The BBC is less concerned with more exotic innovations around XR when it comes to its Glastonbury stream available on its iPlayer portal, focusing instead on ensuring that quality is as good as it can be and available to all users throughout the festival, while hoping to regain some of its earlier reputation for being at the cutting edge of online event coverage. This reputation was established at the 2012 Olympics in London, when the BBC demonstrated almost for the first time that multiple live streams at a major event could be distributed simultaneously to large audiences at a national level, at a quality better than had been attained before at that scale, with relatively few glitches.

This was followed up at Glastonbury 2013 almost a year later, billed as the first truly digital “Glasto”. For the first time then the BBC streamed six stages of live music simultaneously back from Glastonbury for distribution to tablets, laptops, PCs and smartphones, as well as the broadcaster’s connected red button, which was then a relatively popular feature for accessing alternative content on TVs over the air.

These six stages were filmed and mixed before being sent back via satellite to the BBC’s centre at White City in London. At that stage graphics were added and quality checks performed before the signals were transmitted online to the then relatively new MediaCity UK in S...

The dual roles of eight popular emerging technologies and explains how to use them to advance environmental sustainability goals.

Photo: Abhinav Sunil

In the fight against climate change, emerging digital technologies are often rightfully perceived as protagonists. Digital transformation efforts across the board in the coming years will be driven by the evolution of technologies such as edge computing, AI/ML, automation, blockchain, and others. Thus, they are the new shiny balls with tremendous promise but also the potential to harbor risks.

A range of sustainability-related services and solutions have emerged, leveraging these technologies in a variety of carbon emission reduction or climate action arenas. For instance, Forrester predicted that in 2022, edge and IoT will drive new solutions for scope 3 emission reduction.

However, many emerging technologies themselves are not always sustainable in all applications. AI/ML and blockchain, among others, are computationally intensive. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that bitcoin alone consumes more than 100 TWh (terawatt-hour) per year, which is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of the Netherlands. Edge and IoT devices distribute the carbon footprint of computing to the edges of the network. They also contribute to e-waste generation.

Will technology save the planet or destroy it? The answer depends on how we approach it, although it is a bit of both. Technology leaders must consider the right balance of use cases and the application scale to ascertain investments and planning for emerging technologies as an aid for sustainability.

In our latest report, Jekyll And Hyde: The Dual Role Of Emerging Tech In Environmental Sustainability, we explore the dual roles of eight popular emerging technologies: blockchain, digital twins, AI/ML, edge and IoT, processor technology advancements, thermo-optimized data centers, augmented reality/VR, and automation. We examine how they benefit and harm climate action (see figure). For each technology, we: 1) provide a description of its general use case; 2) detail the dual role it plays in sustainability; and 3) highlight future developments and considerations and the emergence of specific sustainability use cases.

This report is a collaboration among Forrester’s specialists in each individual topic area: Glenn O’Donnell, Stephanie Balaouras, Martha Bennett, Paul Miller, Michele Pelino, Craig Le Clair, Zhi-Ying Barry, and Renee Taylor, with inputs from Andre Kindness and Mike Gualtieri.

Talk to us more about this study. Reach out to me at [email protected], or schedule an inquiry to connect.

This blog post is part of Forrester’s Earth Day 2022 series. For more Forrester insights on sustainability, see the full set of Forrester’s climate action blogs.

"Green Stream" a new series of monthly video podcasts from Greening of Streaming that present activities, thought leadership and technical strategies .

"Green Stream" a new series of monthly video podcasts from Greening of Streaming that present activities, thought leadership and technical strategies focussing on sustainability and energy efficiency optimisation in stream delivery.

The archives are captured from the second part of our monthly members meetings, where (once all the day to day business is complete) we invite one member or a guest of a member to talk to the group about a key topic of interest.

In this very first edition of 'Green Stream' Thibaud Biatek from www.ateme.com sets the bar extremely high with a rich presentation titled:

Sustainable OTT Video Distribution Powered by 5G Multicast/ Unicast Delivery and Versatile Video Coding

Thank-you Thibaud!!

Please follow the GoS linked-in group to ensure you catch every forthcoming edition and and for other updates.

For more information: [email protected]