FEED attended the IBC Streamers Meetup hosted by Greening of Streaming, Streaming Video Technology Alliance, Women in Streaming Media and the CDN Alliance. We spoke with Adam Curwin, executive director for Greening of Streaming. The organisation has been well-covered in FEED (see our autumn 2022 report on its presentation to UK Parliament). Greening of Streaming has ‘no greenwashing’ as a guiding principle and is willing to do whatever the science says in its quest to reduce energy use. The organisation tries to avoid shaming colleagues in the industry, but is ready to deliver harsh truths. One of Curwin’s key points is that streaming is much more power-intensive than anyone’s been willing to admit – mostly because no one ran the numbers. Greening of Streaming co-founder Dom Robinson sat down to do the maths himself – where is power consumed in the streaming of video content? The result was a schematic, included below. He found that packets require power at many more points along the delivery path than assumed. The diagram at the bottom of this page – and the next page, and the next page – depicts a model of the most efficient signal path for content from origin to delivery. In reality, the path is often much longer. The signal chain shocked a number of engineers, who tried solving the problem themselves but have yet to come back with a better answer. What do you think? Is there a greener way to deliver content? NO GREENWASHING
trade shows. Air travel needs to be ratcheted down year on year – until we have zero-emissions aircrafts, which are a long way away – and that will affect how we conduct trade shows. In fact, the (outgoing) CEO of Schiphol Airport might have been of better use staying in his job, to discourage IBC delegates from excessive flying. The hard pill we all need to swallow is that Schiphol doesn’t have a crowd management problem, it has a too-many- aeroplanes problem.
At trade shows, we can often give the impression that everything is ‘business as usual.’ We all show up with our best face on, our best story for how the past year has gone and how the next year will go. These are rarely places for revolutionary thinking or challenging the status quo. They’re places to reassure people you’re the same great company you were last year, and that everything is going great. I’m sure this has been true since trade caravans met in ancient Sumer:
GROUNDED Travel chaos at Schiphol Airport affected many IBC attendees
STREAMING’S POWER-HUNGRY JOURNEY
Encoder
LAYER 4
AUTH
DAM
Encoder
LAYER 3
ROUTER
ROUTER
LAYER 2
ACCESS Termination
CORE ACCESS
ACCESS MODEM
DISTRIBUTION AMP (PORT)
AMP
...(AMP)
AMP
AMP
...(AMP)
AMP
LAYER 1
SWITCH(ES)
SCALING
(X2) PER EXCHANGE LOCATION
PER PUBLISHER
(X2) PER PUBLISHER
(X2) PER STREET CABINET
KNOWN AS
ORIGINATION
LAST MILE
CABINET
LOCAL LOOP TELCO
EXCHANGE
TRUNK TELCO
NETWORK FABRIC
MPLS/WDM
PUBLISHER LAN
TELCO/HFC/MOBILE/GPON FTTH ACCESS/OPERATOR
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