Among the various ways to limit the impact of human activity on the environment, reducing energy consumption is one of the most effective options. This also applies to the streaming world.
Streaming technologies have revolutionized the television industry, allowing service providers to create and offer a wealth of new video services. However, these technologies are less energy-efficient than legacy broadcast systems. In the broadcast environment, the network capacity and power consumption are, by definition, totally decorrelated from the number of users. On the other hand, streaming relies on unicast video delivery: requesting more network capacity and consuming more power.
Broadpeak has made energy efficiency a top priority. Discover now the initiatives and solutions that Broadpeak is developing to make video streaming more energy efficient.
Greening of Streaming
Broadpeak co-founded “Greening of Streaming,” an industry organization that aims to quantify the impact of streaming on the environment and promote best practices and solutions to limit this impact.
With innovation in its DNA and energy efficiency in mind, Broadpeak has also been developing technologies to reduce power consumption in video delivery networks.
nanoCDN™ Multicast ABR
Since 2012, Broadpeak’s multicast ABR solution has championed energy efficiency by making the power consumption of the network independent of the number of viewers. Without multicast ABR, if a million people are streaming the same content at the same time, there are 1 million active connections, requiring ad-hoc capacity throughout the network and consuming power accordingly. With multicast ABR, there is only one stream to address the million requests, dramatically reducing capacity needs and energy consumption.
Dynamic CDN
Broadpeak CDN components are available as virtualized and containerized deliveries, enabling cache server workloads to be instantiated only when needed and to share computing infrastructure with other network functions and applications. Cache nodes become dynamic, consuming power only when their function is used.
HW mutualization in a multi-tenancy context
At Broadpeak, we believe that CDN delegation to network operators is a great opportunity to make streaming more energy efficient. When multiple content providers use the same operator’s CDN infrastructure then each of these tenants won’t have to deploy their own cache inside the operator’s network, thus reducing power consumption. Along with others, Broadpeak is driving the SVA Open Caching initiative, that facilitates this pooling.
Enhanced SW/HW integration
Broadpeak continuously optimizes the integration of the CDN software on hardware with the objective to lower power consumption for the same streaming throughput. For instance, Broadpeak software-based management of NVME SSD drives (e.g., for disk failover and aggregation) removes the need for RAID hardware adapters. Combined with high-density I/O processors, this allows for denser and more power-efficient configurations.
