Bitmovin and University of Klagenfurt to work on climate-friendly video streaming

Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt Start €3.3 million Climate-Friendly Video Streaming Platform Research Project ‘GAIA’

KLAGENFURT, Austria — Bitmovin, a leading provider of video streaming infrastructure, and the University of Klagenfurt announced they will collaborate on a two-year joint research project worth €3.3 million to develop a climate-friendly adaptive video streaming platform called ‘GAIA’. The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) will co-fund the project, providing an initial €460,000 in funding for the first year.

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 research project ‘GAIA’ 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.

Discussing the GAIA research project, Stefan Lederer, CEO and Founder at Bitmovin, commented: “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. 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”.

Project ‘GAIA’ aims 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.
• Reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions through advanced analytics and optimizations on all phases of the video delivery chain.

The research project ‘GAIA’ is the fourth time Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt have been awarded funding for a research project and will start on the 1st of October 2022.

Christian Timmerer, Associate Professor at the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC) at the University of Klagenfurt and Laboratory Director, added: “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.”

Radu Prodan, Professor at the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC) at the University of Klagenfurt and Laboratory Director, concluded: “This is a significant investment into energy management strategies for video streaming technologies at a time when online video traffic is growing exponentially. Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt are long-time collaborators, and we look forward to working together once again to help advance sustainability across the video delivery chain.”

Previous project collaborations between the University of Klagenfurt and Bitmovin include:

• Evaluating the codec HEVC
• Adaptive streaming over HTTP and emerging networked multimedia services
• Investigating potential new tools and methodologies for encoding, transport and playback of live and on-demand video using the HTTP Adaptive Streaming protocol