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Empowering Sustainable Streaming
Measuring, Reducing, and Transforming the Environmental Impact of Media
Overview
Media organisations face several challenges in understanding and addressing their environmental impact. Complex supply chains, often involving multiple third-party suppliers, make it difficult to track and manage sustainability performance. Obtaining reliable and comprehensive data from suppliers can be a significant hurdle. Moreover, the lack of universally accepted sustainability metrics makes it challenging to compare performance and identify areas for improvement.
The ECOFLOW project aims to make progress on these challenges by providing a forum where we can collaborate on measuring, reporting, and improving sustainability in the media sector. This collaboration will hopefully empower media organisations to set achievable goals, prioritise efforts, and engage with suppliers to drive transparency and positive change.
Ultimately, the ECOFLOW project seeks to drive real-world reductions in the environmental impact of the media industry. By working together, the project aims to support the industry's transition to a more sustainable future.
Project Structure
The project is structured around three dedicated working groups: Measure, Impact, and Educate. The Measure group takes a two pronged approach: broad analysis of the supply chain and granular measurement of display devices. The aim is to quantify the broad energy and carbon footprint across the supply chain, whilst increasing the knowledge available in the specific area of display devices.
The Impact group aims to help broadcasters test and compare energy-saving features across their operations. This hands-on approach, using a specifically developed demo app, enabled the group to evaluate the effectiveness of these features while fostering a greater understanding of sustainability among audiences.
The Educate group plays a critical role in advancing sustainability knowledge within the media industry. Its first priority was to identify and highlight key challenges encountered during the project, ensuring that stakeholders could address these barriers to sustainability. The group then focused on educating different personas—including CEOs, engineers, and sustainability representatives—by delivering tailored educational content. This personalised approach deepened the understanding of sustainability frameworks, challenges, and best practices, empowering individuals to make informed, sustainable decisions in their operations.
Challenges
The challenges faced by our industry can be broadly divided into three major areas of focus; data collection, industry alignment and implementation.
Data Collection
Driving a transition from modelling to measurement, moving from proxies to first party data measurement where possible, and improving quality, accuracy, completeness and timeliness of data gathered.
Using appropriate information depending on the audience, reporting full Scope 1/2/3 carbon impact for Corporate Disclosure but focussing on energy usage to drive engineering, product development and efficiency improvements in a way that allows users to see the impact of change.
Educating on the differences between attributional and consequential improvements, when each is relevant, and how that contributes to decarbonisation strategies.
Industry Alignment
Framing near term change in the context of overall traffic and workload growth and efficiency, enabling whole system improvements.
Working collaboratively towards standardisation of calculation, ensuring that similar services report similar information in a way that allows transparency, comparability and visibility.
Positioning change alongside overall grid decarbonisation to enable modelling of progress against SBTi and similar targets.
Recognising that each of us has a part to play, but only by collaborating and working together can we achieve significant measurable improvements.
Implementation
Creating a data ecosystem that allows engineering and product teams to measure and track improvement of systems in a way that is reactive to change and allows for predictive modelling of different scenarios.
Empowering and incentivising teams to drive sustainability, squaring the triangle of Cost, Time and Quality to include Sustainability as a pillar of successful design.
Reconciling the relative roles of industry and consumers in driving change, empowering individuals to make sustainable choices without transferring responsibility.
Continuing to drive education across the media industry and beyond, influencing positive change through the content that we produce and distribute and the stories that we tell.
Articles
Explore our collection of articles focused on sustainability in media and streaming. Learn how industry leaders are driving change, discover practical strategies for reducing environmental impact, and stay informed on the latest advancements in sustainable practices.
