Measures, Terms, Language. A philosophical group that discusses - in depth -  the terms and measures we use to describe sustainability and impacts in the media industry.

Recent Publications include

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• 'Watts'

• Power off / Sleep / Standby'

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and current work is focussing on 'Consequential and Attributional Life Cycle Assessments' - an area of misunderstanding so deep in ESG commentary that it causes an abundance of confusion.

A preliminary article on this issue was shared recently here.

Engagement, Education, Recruitment. This group focusses on our touch points with other members at real-world events, speaking and conference engagements (we try to encourage many members to be able to represent GoS to avoid too much extra travel!).

We use this group to source speakers and presenters for both our own and 3rd party events.

This is also the group that organises podcasts and all output we generate.

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Notable events include those on our own events page, and our IBC meeting was covered well in this article on our blog.

Our best practice working group is ultimately the 'aim' of Greening of Streaming.

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As we eventually conclude our empirical work and present recommended ideas for the industry to use as guidance to improve their energy efficiency and sustainability, this working group will publish that in a series of best practice documents. 

For now however, we are some way from those empirical tests being complete, and so the group doubles as our internal governance and public affairs engagement team.

This working group is the first of our engineering working groups, and was founded to better explore the effects of streaming on the distribuiton networks. In the first 2 years we established mthods to measure energy across Content Delivery Networks and then tested those against scaled up large live events such as major football and sporting events and music concerts.

The results were surprising to some: Essentially we showed that assumptions that energy was proportional to data traffice were misguided. 

More recently work has been focussed on LESS Project 1, comparing Multicast, Unicast and Peer to Peer from an energy perspective.

The audio working group has had two projects at its heart. The first of these is a continuation of Working Group 4's exploration of the effect of traffic on the energy of the distribution network. A similar outcome was seen - that there is little proportionality that relates energy to traffic. 

The second project has been exploring the replication of the 'standard music library' (which is typically about 110 million music items and uses about a full rack of servers to host). The aim of the exploration has been to see if this is technically essential, or if it is more a licensing convenience, and if that is the case we plan to open discussions around territory by territory licensing of metadata with rights holders becoming owners of a small number of master head-end content hosts and service providers simply hosting a lightweight archive of metadata. 

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At the heart of streaming service operations is the audio and video encoding setup. It is one place where streaming engineers undeniably hold the steering wheel.

As we started out this obvious group we realised that the unintended consequences of adjusting a stream setup could be very diverse. So for its first 18 months this group founded and kicked off the LESS Accord discussions in order to develop a broad holistic and systemic view of the entire end to end ecosystem.

As we move into our 3rd year this working group is now working on models for energy-profiling codecs and better detailing the energy effects commensurate with changes to the encoding setup.
 

Energy is largely being retro-fit to our understanding of how the streaming industry performs. It was an afterthought. 

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Most standards bodies did not develop their technologies and procols with energy as a first-class citizen in the design process, and as such we find it very hard to really understand imp[lementation of these technologies from an energy perspective.

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WG7 forms liaison with SDOs and other similar industry associations and offers to support them as they begin to think about energy, encouraging this thinking to be included throughout the development process, placing energy performance as a KPI in the standards design criterea.

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We have been exploring access to energy telemetry with numerous members of the InterSDO group and continue to work with SVTA actively and have engaged with 5GMAG, ACM, IETF and many more to encourage this thinking.

Many reports have appeared across the sector pointing the finger at the consumer and their choice of equipment with claims that 70-80% of all the energy used in a streaming workflow is used by the home users devices.

Greening of Streaming takes an empirical view of such claims and seeks to test this assertion. Given that a) noone knows how to measure 'the other 20-30%' these claims seem somewhat sensationalist. We are going to formulate our own models.

Work in this group has been frantic and we have been working through a series of 9 planned hackathons. These are building a real-time energy measurement picture from the encoders, through the transmission network to the home. For the very first time anywhere (we are aware of) we can see energy demand for streaming ebb and flow with our tests in real-time. 

This foundation will lead to a pioneering and much clearer picture of what is happening, and help to moderate some of the guesswork and assuptions  that have been prevalent until now. 

The aim is to use it as a clearing-house for shared data which we want to make available to academic institutions.

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This Working Group is at planning and framework stage.

Over the years we have encountered numerous academic institutions who are developing models that attempt to relate industry activity to energy and then relate that energy information to climate science.

Ultimately we want to be able to talk about the climate impact of our industry. However the industry information that the academics have had access to has been limited and caused a number of misconceptions.

As our various projects start to create energy data that we can relate to our activities with streaming, we plan to offer that data to these academics to both help them improve their models and to ask them to 'hold a mirror up' to our industry and help us understand the climate / environmental impact we are having.