T he Flint Forum is a new monthly online panel series covering topics The inaugural Flint Forum, held in January, was called ‘Scaling the walls of the hyperscalers: How sustainable is the cloud?’ and asked difficult questions about the technology that forms the backbone for much of the modern media industry. Cloud technology enables media businesses to do things much lighter, moving on-premises functions over to data centres and shrinking the business’ physical footprint. Cloud can mean using fewer material resources, being able to do work remotely without having to transport emissions- heavy crew or gear – and it can be very efficient, employing shared resources rather than dedicated hardware in a basement that could be completely inactive for hours at a time yet still drawing power. We all suspect that working the cloud must be the more sustainable choice for much of what we do in the media industry. But the truth is we just don’t know for sure. With everything in the cloud, we have to ask ourselves other sustainability questions. Where does the energy come from to power all those new data centres? Where does the water come from to cool them? What happens to the e-waste produced when those thousands of servers are repaired or upgraded? And how can we measure the carbon produced on our behalf by the major cloud providers, who can be very closed-mouth about what goes on inside their walls? affecting sustainability in the media and entertainment industry. This moderated discussion and Q&A gets beneath the surface of the issues. Conversations are freewheeling, sometimes provocative and always fascinating. THE SEARCH FOR CLOUD CLARITY January’s Flint Forum invited François Polarczyk, sustainability director at OTT software provider Accedo; Dom Robinson, co-founder of sustainable streaming think tank Greening of Streaming; and Mike Ward, head of marketing at cloud graphics company Singular.live. It was moderated by The Flint ’s editorial director Neal Romanek. Greening of Streaming has been working on the complicated issues of sustainability in video delivery for three years, counting most major cloud video technology companies among its membership. What it has discovered is that sustainability in video delivery is much more complex than anyone had supposed. Trying to figure out where energy is being used in video delivery and who is responsible for that energy is extremely difficult – let alone trying to
WATCH ME! The first Flint Forum brought together key industry experts
the encoder in their production facility to the cloud instead,” explains Greening of Streaming’s Robinson. “The cloud service wants to offer you four nines on the availability of that service, so it spins up a spare. Then it sees you spin up a second computer, which you have done for your own redundancy, so it spins up a spare for that – now you have four computers running. But they aren’t really running, they were already running in the data centre, they’ve just been allocated to you for now. So it’s extremely confusing. You can’t say: ‘I used this computer for this much time, therefore my carbon footprint was x’, because it doesn’t work like that.” Unfortunately, the cloud hyperscalers aren’t always forthcoming in clarifying some of these issues. Cloud customers often lack sufficient insight about what goes on in their data centres. The Flint Forum panel accused them of coming dangerously close to greenwashing. “If you’re someone that doesn’t know anything about sustainability, energy consumption and CO2 emissions,” observed Accedo’s Polarczyk, “you’ll see that GCP (Google Cloud Platform) has been carbon neutral for longer than any of the other providers. But is that a good thing? This could simply mean that they’re consuming a lot of carbon-intensive energy and offsetting it with carbon credits. “Selling your service, product or company as carbon neutral is a fantasy – it cannot happen. The only thing that can be carbon neutral is the planet.” Polarczyk also underlined the need
for more transparency from cloud companies around environmental footprint, particularly around carbon. AWS reports the market value of the energy used for a certain
period of time, which the Amazon CTO has
determine its carbon emissions. “A classic example: someone doing a simple live workflow decides to move
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