InBroadcast - April 2022 - 78

78
www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 12 - Issue 4 | April 2022
InForm
The Greening of Streaming cont'd...
" to enable up to 50
percent reduction in bitrate
over the state-of-the-art
and allows
third-party
conventional,
encoders
to
produce higher quality
video at lower bitrates, "
Grce explains. " These
results
are
validated by
extensive commercial
tests and human ratings
obtained
with standard
protocols like ITU-T P.910
ACR tests. "
BitSave mimics
the
elements
of
key
human
vision system via a deep
perceptual
importance,
such as those with high
motion or detailed
optimiser. It
is able to isolate areas of
perceptual
texture, and
optimize their structure so that they
are preserved better at lower bitrate
by any subsequent encoder.
" It's
100 percent
user's
device than services
that
codec
independent, which means that it
is not beholden to any standard or
format and can be applied
to any
today
workflow that has
application, platform, or
to move data
quickly and efficiently, " Grce says.
" Overall, BitSave improves
on
multiple quality metrics, and across
multiple video encoding standards.
We believe we can go further since
our approach offers
gains
to any
perceptual quality optimisation. "
Fellow codec
CO2 output
and
innovator V-Nova
finds that it is still hard to precisely
quantify
that
profiling the energy usage of different
services is challenging.
" For example, services offering a
greater volume of content (YouTube)
and
devices
and
greater weight
decoding mostly on mobile
tablets
have a far
towards datacentre
processing and delivery versus the
transmit a lower amount of content to
large screen TVs, " says Guido Meardi
CEO and co-founder.
Meardi reports that conversations
pressure from
with customers,
investors and customers is pushing
sustainability
priorities
of
rapidly
for
up the
video
list
services;
" Ultimately, a service's sustainability
credentials become another point of
competitive differentiation. "
V-Nova offers a comprehensive
compounded
encoder-specific
SDK for the deployment of MPEG5
LCEVC - a new standard which
enhances both the compression
efficiency (quality) and processing
complexity (energy consumption) of
existing base codecs like AVC, HEVC,
AV1. " For example, LCEVC-enhanced
AVC can cut
50% and
required
required bitrates by
transcoding
energy by 60% while maintaining
the same quality. For more complex
next-gen codecs such as AV1 or VVC,
LCEVC still
provides
compression
efficiency benefits, and can decrease
transcoding energy consumption by
over 3x.
" The other significant
Without
energy
benefit of LCEVC comes from its
native
backwards-compatibility.
LCEVC, the only way
deliver multiple video workflows. "
Antonio Corrado,
MainStreaming
Quantifying CDN carbon costs
There are three challenges when
quantifying CDN energy usage, as
outlined by Dr Gwendal
Simon,
Distinguished Software Architect at
Synamedia.
to
provide better quality and lower
bandwidth
to new devices is to
1. Each technology
involved
has a different model for energy
consumption: CPU depends on the
instantaneous load, memory on the
size. The industry is still debating
whether to measure transport per
volume or per capacity.
2. The infrastructure is
shared
internally
externally
(servers
(multi-tenancy) and
are connected
over the Internet). We can shut
down a server to save energy, but
we cannot shut down the network
between servers.
3. Some content is more critical
than others, e.g, emergency videos
vs educational and entertainment.
Some operators believe essentials
should
be
omitted
from carbon
calculations.
For example, when an edge server
stores a video in cache, any future
request for this video will be directly
served from cache, saving the energy
to download it from the origin. But
the cache consumes energy too. To
claim energy
quantify
the
savings, we should
volume of requests
served from cache to compensate
for the edge server's energy usage.
This analysis becomes more complex
when a few critical videos force us to
run this server anyway.
The industry goal
is leaner CDN
solutions while maintaining viewers'
quality
include:
Elastic CDN - The infrastructure
adjusts to the traffic volume in realtime.
AI
predicts
next-hour
load to either boot up new edge
servers or shut down existing ones,
without impacting QoE.
traffic
expectations: Concepts
Smart edge - This reduces
the number of video files
per title to reduce the
infrastructure footprint.
Analysis
finds the sweet
spot between the number
of
profiles
bitrates, formats,
(resolutions,
etc),
the number of variants
(A/B watermark), and the
number of copies (cache
group).
Synamedia's cloud Digital
Manager
Content
(DCM) platform lets
OTT providers
reduce
hardware as part of their
CO2 commitments. DCM
packs the most encoding
on
the
compression.
" Unlike today's
least
using Synamedia's
hardware
Vivid
proprietary CDN
logging systems, future standardized
end-to-end log collection should
include data to calculate energy
consumption with full transparency, "
says Simon.
" We expect
regulators will
CO2 requirements
set
for streaming
providers. Measuring consumption
is a first step; quotas for the use
of renewables and SLAs that cap
energy at the 95th percentile may
come. We also anticipate the launch
of streaming services with green
credentials
for those consumers
willing to tolerate lower quality
video. "
MainStreaming, another founding
partner of the Greening of Streaming
organisation, agrees
participants
that
are becoming
increasingly sophisticated in their
understanding of
environmental
issues and more discerning in their
choices.
" With switching costs
streaming services so easy
between
and
points of differentiation increasingly
slim on a technological level, green
issues will increasingly become
a point of significant competitive
advantage, " says Antonio Corrado,
CEO. " From our inception we've
built consideration of environmental
impact directly into the technological
choices we make.
" Our technology is geared around
minimising power consumption. Our
adoption of algorithms to manage
adaptive demand and flow and move
functions to the Edge where possible
doesn't just serve to make our
industry
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