Media and entertainment is travel- and waste-heavy, fuelled by gargantuan, energy-gobbling data centres. It’s time to accept responsibility and act now
here are too many verticals in which the media and entertainment (M&E) industry is damaging our
production is helping to address that, you still get location costs for the B roll to create those virtual environments. “Another part of the contribution comes from the fact that our industry has historically relied upon on- premises edit suites and large-scale data centres – especially for things like render farms. “Even with just archives, be they physical or digital, the issue remains that there is a big storage facility there. That’s a lot of hardware investment, which then involves all the power and cooling for each one, regardless of where it’s located. And archive indexes generally have very heavy databases that require a lot of processing power and cooling to keep them running.” The first port of call is to uncover the significant areas that churn out carbon in your organisation. Carson has outlined how easy it is for any business to tumble down a rabbit hole of emissions tracking. Nevertheless, there are two key data points for media and entertainment inefficiency: it’s both a travel- and waste-heavy industry – especially in terms of energy.
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environment. So many, in fact, that the probability of finding a single solution is becoming increasingly unlikely. Once an appropriate sense of accountability has been taken, the best approach any M&E decision- maker can take when it comes to sustainability is to assess the main elements of environmental impact from its operations. The company must then seek out the solutions on offer, which can accelerate the ascent towards the golden gates of zero carbon. When we accept the extent of the harm we’re causing, we become open to the available solutions. IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM “There are a couple of very large bits of carbon creation that the M&E industry has contributed to significantly,” begins Eric Carson, Chief Revenue Officer for Ateliere. “On the production side, there’s a massive amount of wasteful flight travel to deliver on-location productions. Even though virtual
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“It comes down to the levels of power consumption,” Carson continues, “and depends on where data centres are located. Generally, it’s the retrofitted data centres that haven’t been designed from the ground up, which ultimately means they tend to be less efficient.” Facilities described by Carson are not only ill-fitted for energy efficiency, but the power that’s being fed into them isn’t always generated in the cleanest manner. “You’re also stuck with whatever is coming in off the grid into that building,” Carson adds. “But, if you look at a cloud computation provider
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