Streaming Media Sneak Preview: Computing While Cooling With Netflix, Adeia, the Greening of Streaming, and Help Me Stream Research Foundation
Streaming Media returns to New York City, the epicenter of the digital media universe, May 20–22 with Streaming Media NYC, chaired by Media Industry Cartographer Evan Shapiro and curated in conjunction with the Streaming Media editorial team. Located in Manhattan’s Midtown East at the dazzling InterContinental New York Barclay, Streaming Media NYC features three days of engaging programming on cutting-edge topics and packed with dynamic panelists and keynote speakers from the upper ranks of the media firmament. In this Sneak Preview series, we’ll zoom in for a close-up look at key sessions in the program and the expert speakers who will bring them to life.
On Wednesday, May 22, at Streaming Media NYC, Dom Robinson, Founder of Greening of Streaming and Director of id3as/Norsk, will moderate an all-star panel, "Computing While Cooling," made up of leading streaming technology providers and innovators. The panel will discuss how to make media’s tech stack more cost-and energy-efficient and implement sound and sustainable best practices throughout the media supply chain.
Dom Robinson has spent over 25 years focused specifically on the complex challenges facing the streaming market. He founded the first large-scale CDN in Europe, a multicasting pioneer that between 2001 and 2009 it grew to carry over 150m streams each month for clients as diverse as Sky Sports, RT News and over 60% of the UK’s Internet Radio. In 2020 he co-founded industry special-interest group Greening of Streaming, which is bringing together industry actors to focus on energy efficiency and sustainability best practice in CDN and video delivery architecture.
When asked about the origins of the Greening of Streaming group in an interview with Broadpeak, Robinson said, “GoS grew out of conversations in the sidelines of the Streaming Media and Content Delivery Summit conferences and 2020 and 2021 precipitated into a members association formed from technology vendors, service operators and online publishers. We are principally focused on raising energy efficiency as a primary design principle for engineering streaming systems. Until now energy efficiency has largely been an afterthought. We want to change that and make it a first-class design principle. Since streaming involves long complex shared supply chains, we know that technical choices we make as we design a streaming service can potentially make significant changes to overall power consumption through those systems. We are working to understand that relationship, and to do so very practically.”
Panelist Sujana Sooreddy is a Senior Lead Software Engineer at Netflix, working primarily on the Media Infrastructure and Platforms team. A key aspect of her role involves optimizing compute efficiency and resource usage on the platform that supports all media encoding workflows at the company. She's skilled in the distributed asynchronous realm, focusing on improving systems to enhance effectiveness, scalability, and cost-efficiency.
"Environmental degradation isn't a standalone problem, but a common responsibility that demands our united effort,” Sooreddy says. “As we navigate the surge of the streaming era, amplified by the growing computational demands of AI development, we simply can't treat sustainability as an afterthought. Purposeful discussions on this topic at forums like SMNYC equip us with the momentum required for collective action. Let these dialogues be the catalyst for genuine, real-life solutions, helping transform our industry into one that harmoniously balances technological advancements with ecological care."
Panelist Serhad Doken, CTO of Adeia, is responsible for the technology roadmap, research strategy and advanced R&D projects. Doken previously was the Executive Director of Innovation & Product Realization at Verizon where he drove new 5G and Mobile Edge Computing powered services for Consumer and Enterprise Businesses. Prior to Verizon, Doken held positions at InterDigital, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, and PSI AG.
"The video ecosystem can advance sustainability by continuing to innovate video compression to reduce data and energy consumption,” Doken says. “However, as demand for bandwidth-intensive content rises, compression efforts must be combined with smart traffic management, by making good engineering decisions about how and when to execute runtimes on the cloud, edge or device. Additionally, choosing more efficient programming languages, such as C over Python, can contribute to sustainability in video solutions."
Panelist Tim Fore-Siglin is a contributing editor to Streaming Media, with more than 23 years of experience in the streaming industry. He's also the founding executive director of Help Me Stream Research Foundation, a not-for-profit 501(c)3 that researches the use of first-world older technologies as a catalyst to provide low-cost streaming gear for NGOs in emerging economies, disaster areas, and remote or rural communities.
In Fore-Siglin’s The State of Streaming Sustainability 2024, he writes, “Every year, there seems to be a new power-hungry use case for computing applications. A few years ago, it was cryptocurrency. This year, it’s machine learning (being sold as AI, which doesn’t actually exist, as simple gaming of machine learning algorithms veering easily toward screed and hate language has shown).
“In all of the hype around crypto and AI, one might assume that streaming doesn’t really consume enough energy to significantly move the needle on power generation and consumption. Yet, while there are numerous narratives floating around on the topic of streaming’s power problem, there’s a bigger issue at play with streaming: How do we make it sustainable, even as it grows to be the dominant form of audio and video delivery globally?”
“Computing While Cooling” takes place on Wednesday, May 22, Day Three of Streaming Media NYC. Check out the full program here to learn more about the conference’s action-packed offerings.
Register today for Streaming Media NYC! Early bird pricing ($100 off) available through April 19.
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