One in four U.S. consumers believes there is no environmental impact from video streaming, and even those that do, don’t know to what degree, according to recent research from Bitmovin. The company’s Head of Strategic Growth and Chief Architect Igor Oreper believes a standardized form of carbon-output measurement is the needed industry response.
Bitmovin is a streaming-centered software company founded in 2012 that helps organizations optimize the delivery, encoding, and playback of their video content. The research was conducted externally by Censuswide analyzing 2001 survey respondents across the U.S.
The survey indicated that 28% of respondents thought there was zero carbon output caused by video streaming. When it was then revealed to be around 36g CO2e for a single hour of streaming, over half (59%) said it was higher than expected, and 78% admitted having to guess what the actual emission impact of streaming was.
“Consumers don't really think about sustainability when it comes to video streaming because it's such an ephemeral thing,” Oreper told StreamTV Insider. “I think consumers understand that they need to charge their devices, which does take energy, but that's probably where it ends, right? They're not thinking about all the data centers that are humming in the background to encode the video, to deliver and distribute the video over content delivery networks worldwide.”Bitmovin also referenced research conducted by Mckinsey & Co and NielsenIQ which found a strong majority of consumers asserting that sustainability is an important issue to them (78%). The disparity between claimed importance and actual awareness of streaming’s impact — particularly when video streaming is such a highly-used service in countries like the U.S. — beckoned Bitmovin to ask the question: who’s responsible for making streaming more sustainable?
The survey reflected no real consensus, though it favored the streaming platforms and infrastructure providers as beholden (57%) over the viewers themselves (only 20%). Oreper agrees.
“There's little that consumers can do on their own… The biggest and most important thing for the industry, as a whole, is measurement, agreeing on some standard of measurement of the sustainability across the supply chain,” he explained. “We are not there yet.” Still, 64% of the survey respondents indicated that they would prioritize a sustainable streaming platform over “non-sustainable alternatives,” and this percentage rose to 90% for those aged 35-44. But what would that realistically look like?
Oreper signaled that optimized streaming modes like Bitmovin’s recently developed ECO Mode is one method. The ECO Mode delivers optimized video quality through reduced transmitted bits on its Bitmovin Player — a feature developed in partnership with the University of Klagenfurt for Project GAIA.“It's something that we were able to do because we provide a commercial player. This player is responsible for over 2 billion impressions every single month from our customer base. And so, while a small impact, that's a positive impact we think we can make,” he explained. But Operer emphasized that standardization remains the top-needed priority. “You can’t reduce what you can’t measure.”
Updated to reflect the research was conducted by Censuswide. An earlier version stated Sapio Research.