Putting a price on energy efficiency in streaming

The pressure on media companies to improve sustainability is rising, driven by regulatory shifts and the rising costs of energy consumption. Across the industry, corporate boards are increasingly focused on measuring environmental impact, tracking power usage across operations and vendor partners, and ensuring compliance against new directives.

Although many broadcasters and operators rightly hold their technology partners accountable for helping reduce emissions, there are huge opportunities often overlooked in network optimisation that could significantly lower their own energy consumption and operating costs. All too often, we see departmental fragmentation and internal silos holding back sustainability initiatives, with environmental advocates and cost-focused decision-makers struggling to align their efforts, preventing coordinated action. This disconnect means companies are missing out on millions in potential savings while failing to address energy inefficiencies, neglecting the real potential to improve both the bottom line and environmental impact.

Streaming businesses that want to achieve a meaningful environmental impact while reducing operational costs need to have a clearer understanding of the value of network optimization. Let’s join some dots between energy efficiency and cost reduction.

Bridging the cost v energy efficiency gap

While major streaming companies have made strides in improving energy efficiency, sustainability is still too often diluted among other business and technology objectives like cost reduction and operational scale. Content providers, meanwhile, are tasked with balancing acceptable levels of video quality with the rising energy demands of ultra-high-definition content — especially during live events. Business, technology, and sustainability leaders need to find ways to bridge the gap between cost savings and energy efficiency, ensuring and promoting cross-organizational buy-in to meet sustainability goals.

One of the biggest inefficiencies in streaming lies in infrastructure dimensioned to handle peak demand, often causing servers to remain idle while consuming energy unnecessarily. One idle server can consume up to 80% of the energy required for a server that is fully loaded. The shift from traditional broadcasting to streaming has only exacerbated this issue. To avoid unnecessary infrastructure expansion, streaming companies should leverage open CDN models and higher performance streaming delivery methods to scale more efficiently, helping reduce energy consumption while improving operational performance. Open CDN enables mutualised resource sharing and harnesses existing infrastructure further down the network, typically provided by national internet service providers (ISPs) — driving improved energy efficiency, reduced hardware investment, and better video quality for end users.

Meanwhile, Multicast ABR (m-ABR) is now widely used by leading operators and streaming services to deliver dual benefits of improved energy and cost efficiency. Instead of delivering individual unicast streams to every viewer, multicast ABR allows one stream to be sent to millions of viewers simultaneously in multicast fashion reducing bandwidth consumption while minimizing the need for redundant, energy-draining infrastructure. This is especially important during live events, where traffic surges can overwhelm traditional unicast delivery methods, leading to inefficient energy usage and poor viewer experiences.

Recent cross-industry collaborations, particularly through initiatives like the TM Forum Catalyst Projects, are continuing to explore ways to reduce the financial and environmental costs of video traffic. We participated in a sustainability-focused project with industry leaders like Rai, TF1, Bouygues Telecom, TIM and others, with encouraging findings showing that ISPs that can open their multicast and unicast network capacity to live content providers to generate an 80-90% reduction in CDN server energy consumption. Instead of relying on idle edge cache servers that contribute to energy waste during off-peak hours, optimizing delivery models with multicast capabilities can allow companies to reduce traffic peaks, minimize hardware needs, and significantly improve energy efficiency.

Collaboration drives energy reduction and sustainable revenues

While cloud scalability offers flexibility, uncontrolled computing costs can quickly offset energy savings. To truly maximize both sustainability and financial benefits, media companies need to balance cloud usage with localised caching and multicast distribution strategies. Companies that invest in optimising their infrastructure and embracing technologies like multicast ABR and open CDN will be best positioned to efficiently scale their audience while being more profitable.

As the demand for live streaming content continues to surge, it’s time for companies to stop acting in silos. If we want a greener future for entertainment, technology providers, ISPs, OTT platforms, and broadcasters need to work together to implement more sustainable solutions. By optimizing existing resources and embracing energy-efficient technologies, the industry can make important incremental changes that reduce costs, protect user experiences, and lay foundations for a greener future.

Damien Sterkers is video solutions marketing director at Broadpeak