Sustainability in Video Communications

About

Over the past years, video network traffic is rapidly increasing and currently accounts for the highest Internet-exchanged traffic. In addition, the recent COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the rapid adoption of digital online services. As a result, live and on-demand video exchange becomes the norm for daily work and leisure activities. Popular examples are on-demand streaming platforms (Netflix, Apple TV, HBO, Amazon Prime, etc.) and live video conferencing and collaborative online workspaces (Zoom, Webex, MS Teams, etc.). Furthermore, the accessibility to powerful and affordable devices, and the advances in cloud-computing technologies, enable users to create and share live or on-demand short user-generated content clips over social media/sharing platforms (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.). Associated with the drivers described above, the content creation and video communications pipeline is having a significant and increasing impact on global energy consumption, with a large percentage associated with cloud computing services, data centres, display devices, and video delivery. While the focus of most climate change activists is on the transport and energy sectors’ emissions, the ICT /creative industries are on track to generate more carbon emissions than all aforementioned sectors. While estimates vary, there is concensus of an impending major global issue. As the resources allocated to this project are limited, we will focus on proposing solutions for the video delivery (compression and transmission) use case. In the above context, the objectives of this project are: (i) to review current practises and energy demands in the content creation and delivery pipeline, (ii) to study and (as far as possible) quantify the energy profile associated with current practises in the creative industry and video providers and (iii) to make recommendations for sustainable solutions, focused on the video delivery (encoding, optimisation, transmission and decoding).

Below you may find the related publications.

Funders

Bristol+Bath Creative Cluster/UKRI, University of Bristol

Collaborators

Dr Daniel Schien (University of Bristol) and Dr Ioannis Mavromatis (BRIL, Toshiba Europe Ltd)