IBC2021 Accelerators: Sustainability in Live Production

It’s worth breaking out the last of the eight IBC Accelerator articles I wrote into its own post as the topic is so important.

The picture above is from Sky’s first net zero football match, Spurs vs Chelsea, in September 2021. Here’s a snippet:

“ Sky, for instance, has gone carbon neutral for all its UK sports OBs this year and also produced its first net carbon zero football match in September, reducing its emissions by 70% and offsetting the remaining 30%.

(The important distinction between the two is that achieving ‘carbon neutrality’ is simply a case of purchasing the equivalent amount of carbon reduction credits to balance emissions, whereas ‘net zero’ involves a concerted attempt to reduce emissions with any remaining balance then being offset.)

The move towards cloud production, however, throws up several issues as the data on power consumption within data centres, and the way that different cloud workflows impact them, is largely unknown.

Mike Ward is head of marketing at Accelerator participant singular.live. “One of the black holes for us is that we’re a cloud platform, entirely digital cloud native, and so we make assumptions that therefore we are a more environmentally friendly platform than say, going out buying graphics hardware and shipping it around the world. But we don’t know, because we don’t get any measurement from any of our cloud providers. And Sky and BBC and BT Sport were saying the same thing; we just don’t get that data back from them.”

Read the full piece here: IBC2021 Accelerators: Sustainability in Live Production