Video streaming infrastructure provider Bitmovin is joining forces with the University of Klagenfurt on a two-year joint research project worth to develop a climate-friendly adaptive video streaming platform known as GAIA.
The companies say that the threat of climate change requires drastically reducing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the next few years, with internet data traffic responsible for more than half of digital technology's global impact. As such, the GAIA research project will look to develop an adaptive video streaming platform that provides complete energy awareness and accountability, including energy consumption and GHG emissions, along the entire delivery chain.
GAIA will aim to identify ways to improve sustainability and reduce energy consumption across the end-to-end video streaming chain by enabling energy awareness and accountability, including benchmarking and predicting energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across the entire delivery chain, from content creation and server-side encoding to video transmission and client-side rendering. It will also investigate reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions through advanced analytics and optimsations on all phases of the video delivery chain.
Previous project collaborations between the University of Klagenfurt and Bitmovin have evaluated the HEVC codec and looked at adaptive streaming over HTTP and emerging networked multimedia services. The have also investigated ting potential new tools and methodologies for encoding, transport and playback of live and on-demand video using the HTTP Adaptive Streaming protocol.
The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) will co-fund the €3.3million project, providing an initial €460,000 in funding for the first year.
“With quick action needed against climate change, our work on project GAIA with the University of Klagenfurt will pave the way for climate-friendly video streaming consumption,” commented Stefan Lederer, CEO and Founder at Bitmovin Discussing the GAIA research project. “The funding received from FFG not only enables us to find a solution to the 306 million tons of CO2 that streaming and video processing generates and bears testament to the impactful research we have done in partnership with Klagenfurt previously.”
Added Christian Timmerer, associate professor at the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC) at the University of Klagenfurt and laboratory director: "Everyone should be doing their part to reduce their carbon footprint, including the video streaming industry. The partnership between Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt helps address the industry's need for more accurate ways to quantify and predict energy consumption and emitted greenhouse gases across the video delivery chain, helping ensure the industry is doing its part to become more sustainable."