GoS x HNR: When Goals and Aspirations Align

Most people in the broadcast and streaming technology industry are familiar with Greening of Streaming (GoS), a member organisation that works to address growing concerns about the energy impact of the streaming sector.

GoS founder and industry veteran Dom Robinson had been posing questions around sustainability whenever the chance came up: as contributing editor of Streaming Media magazine, when organising the “Content Delivery Summit” and frequently in conversations with industry peers. He soon realised there was interest in a member-led trade association to help drive sustainability. That’s why he launched Greening of Streaming in 2020.

GoS is fundamentally a practical organisation looking to make a real difference, introducing best practices around energy consumption and enabling the industry to engineer more sustainable solutions. Members take part in foundational working groups, each with well-defined goals, such as investigating a specific hypothesis, defining greener processes, helping educate industry stakeholders, and fighting greenwashing.

GoS is a non-for-profit organisation and its working groups’ intellectual property is, and will remain, open source.

First Measure, Then Act

To understand how streaming uses energy, GoS needed to first capture and understand real-world data, so they set out to look for the right tools to collect, store, and analyse data pertaining to energy consumption.

By serendipity, Dom met HNR’s CEO, Kristan Bullett, who was building a system to measure data related to the sustainability of digital operations. There was clear alignment in terms of goals and aspirations, and GoS quickly chose to implement HNR to ZERO, HNR’s analytics platform, as their data collection toolset for all their initiatives.  

Let’s take a closer look at how HNR to ZERO is supporting some of GoS’ working groups:

Working Group 4 (WG4)

• This initiative collects power consumption data from technical partners that enable the contribution and distribution of major live events, such as popular entertainment contests and major sporting tournaments.
• WG4’s hypothesis is that “there will be no fluctuation in energy as an audience of 30 million people connect to, consume, and disconnect from a large live streaming event”, because energy consumption is not directly related to traffic and usage. Instead, WG4 postulates that energy consumption in stream transmission is related to infrastructure provisioning, availability, and SLA.
• HNR to ZERO takes care of the complex recording and enrichment of data points, providing aggregated, granular visualisation of live event data through dashboards and custom-made reports.

Working Group 8 (WG8)

• WG8 looks to measure the power consumption of streaming devices at home, i.e. anything that the consumer may lease or buy to receive streams: set-top box, router, etc., through WiFi-powered measuring devices that can be cheaply placed at thousands of consumers’ homes.
• Data will be aggregated in the service providers’ cloud, brought into HNR to ZERO and then synchronised with energy inputs from WG4 and WG6 (the encoding Working Group) to build an end-to-end picture of a streaming event’s energy spend.
• At that point, and for the first time on record, GoS will have a real-world measurement from the streaming encoder to the consumer’s home.

Why Choose HNR to ZERO?

HNR to ZERO serves as the single, accurate source for all data that GoS collects across all its working groups and is key to the organisation’s ability to test, prove, and generate ideas for a greener streaming industry.

"We could have just gone through some S3 buckets to collect data, but we wanted an added level of analysis and independent reporting, which HNR delivers. All technology providers should leverage HNR to ZERO to bring extra value to their customers”. Dom Robinson, Founder, Greening of Streaming

Through its data collection and analysis, HNR to ZERO is building an industry standard, a well-reasoned framework to measure the power consumption of streaming. Robinson believes that all industry stakeholders will soon be able to identify HNR’s data demographics as a proven model for the measuring and reporting of their in-house energy consumption.

“HNR to ZERO is fundamental for our data aggregation and segmentation” states Robinson, “and as the central heart of our data collection, HNR have a key function in our CTO office. Both their work as service provider and their member insights are invaluable to Greening of Streaming. We are deeply appreciative of their support from day one.”

Whereas public cloud providers can deliver some data to their clients, HNR to ZERO provides meaningful analysis, aggregating and presenting information in such a way that it informs business decisions. Data is not just stored, but broken down across configurable criteria, and presented in clear reports that can be easily audited by independent third parties.

“We don’t want to interpret the data ourselves at the risk of greenwashing,” – continues Robinson. “That’s why it’s tremendously useful to have HNR to ZERO’s analysis and granular reports, which we will be sharing with a range of university research teams, so they can help us make sense of our readings”.

A Greener Future Streaming Ahead

Greening of Streaming is steadily growing, increasing its member count and growing its team of volunteers each month. This enables them to work on bigger, better, and greener initiatives as well as to spread the word far and wide.

If your company is involved in any aspect of video streaming, whether as a technology enabler or streaming platform provider, you’ll benefit from joining GoS. Member companies help steer research direction, take part in working groups, and gain access to online resources, tools, and conferences.

More importantly, you’ll be playing a key part in driving the streaming industry towards a more sustainable, greener future.

To learn more about how HNR’s award-winning platform, HNR to ZERO, can help your organisation optimise your technology operations and run a more sustainable and efficient business, book your demo now.