Video streaming has reshaped media consumption, and the demand for live content is putting significant pressure on network resources. Every live-streamed event—be it sports, news, or global broadcasts—creates sudden traffic spikes that test the limits of network infrastructures. This traffic surge doesn’t just increase costs related to the extra equipment needed to dimension networks to the peaks of traffic; it also escalates the energy demands. Today’s challenge is to support this increasing traffic growth while minimizing resource use.
The TM Forum Catalyst project on Sustainable Live Streaming tackled this challenge head-on. TIM, Rai, TF1, Bouygues Telecom, Edgio, Du, Humans Not Robots, and Broadpeak partnered on this project to investigate practical ways to cut energy and hardware costs associated with live streaming. This article details the project’s methodologies, key processes, and results, highlighting ways towards more sustainable streaming solutions.
We hope these findings will ignite interest in sustainable practices within the industry and potentially lead to further project phases, opening doors for more operators and broadcasters to join the conversation.
TM Forum Catalyst on Sustainability in Context – The Start
The TM Forum Catalyst on Sustainable Live Streaming emerged from a question raised by Oualid Saddi, Chief Architect of Bouygues Telecom’s Connectivity and Video Services Department.
The inquiry aimed at addressing the growing resource demands linked to live video streaming and finding a sustainable approach to manage the associated energy and cost burdens. Recognizing the need for a structured approach, Bouygues Telecom and its partners decided to collaborate with the TM Forum to leverage its framework and expertise.
What are TM Forum and the Moonshot Catalyst Projects?
TM Forum is a global alliance connecting over 800 members from the telecom and tech sectors. It aims to drive innovation and collaboration across the ecosystem, facilitating projects and initiatives that shape the industry’s future.
TM Forum’s Catalyst programs, such as Moonshot Catalyst, focus on ambitious goals—like achieving net-zero emissions by 2030. These programs bring together industry stakeholders to tackle complex problems, fast-track innovation, and develop practical solutions that can be scaled across the sector.
Members Involved in the Sustainable Live Streaming Catalyst
The Sustainable Live Streaming Catalyst brought together diverse industry leaders, each contributing with a unique expertise:
Content providers:
- TF1 (France): As Europe’s largest private TV network, TF1 plays a pivotal role in shaping the continent’s media landscape.
- Rai (Italy): Known for its forward-thinking approach, RAI is a leader in public broadcasting and a driver of digital innovation.
Telecom operators:
- Bouygues Telecom (France): A key player in telecommunications, Bouygues Telecom spearheaded the initiative, demonstrating its commitment to sustainability.
- Du (UAE): This telecom provider is focused on supporting the UAE’s digital transformation goals while addressing energy efficiency.
- TIM (Italy): A major telecom operator, TIM’s participation helped ensure that the project’s outcomes will be relevant to Europe’s diverse media markets, focusing on the impact of popular live events (e.g. sport) on large scale OTT video delivery platforms.
- Pioneers in sustainability assessment:
- Humans Not Robots: This company brought expertise in assessing and measuring sustainability impact, ensuring that the project’s goals were grounded in measurable outcomes.
Global CDN providers:
- Edgio: As a significant content delivery network (CDN) player, Edgio’s involvement was important for exploring ways to optimize content delivery while minimizing energy consumption.
Streaming Technology Providers:
- Broadpeak: Known for its innovative streaming solutions, Broadpeak brought cutting-edge technology to the project, focusing on reducing the carbon footprint of live video streaming.
The collaboration aimed to address how live streaming impacts the capital and operational expenses as well as energy footprint of telecom infrastructure. By exploring practical ways to cut down energy and costs, the Catalyst project set out to create a blueprint for sustainable streaming that CSPs can adopt.
The Process: Rethinking the Content Delivery Model
The Sustainable Live Streaming Catalyst focused on transforming the current content delivery approach to improve energy and cost efficiency. The proposed solution involved rethinking the delivery model by leveraging communication service providers (CSPs)’ mutualized network infrastructures and multicast capabilities.
Here’s how the process unfolded:
Observation of the Current Situation (Scenario 1):
- Live streaming content typically relies on edge cache servers controlled by individual content providers.
- To handle traffic spikes during major live events, the network infrastructure downstream from these servers needs to be scaled up significantly, resulting in high hardware and energy demands.
- During off-peak times, these edge cache servers often remain idle, leading to resource inefficiencies.
First Level of Optimization: Mutualized Edge Caching (Scenario 2):
- By using edge cache servers operated by public CDNs and CSPs, the project looked at sharing resources across multiple content providers.
- This mutualization helped reduce the number of servers needed overall, lowering both hardware costs and energy consumption. It also minimized the underutilization of resources during off-peak hours.
- Although the network still needed to support high traffic volumes during live events, the shared infrastructure reduced the strain on individual servers and increased efficiency.
Second Level of Optimization: Multicast Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (Scenario 3):
- The next step was to integrate the multicast transmission capabilities of CSPs into the streaming process. Multicast ABR allows a single stream of content to be sent through the network, regardless of the number of viewers.
- This significantly decreases the amount of data transferred over the network, cuts down on the number of CDN servers required, and slashes the energy consumption associated with streaming.
- By using multicast, CSPs could manage peak demand more efficiently without having to over-dimension their networks for traffic spikes.
Integrating these optimizations created a more energy-efficient and cost-effective approach to live streaming, demonstrating practical steps that CSPs can adopt to reduce their environmental impact.
Methodology – How We Did It.
The project’s results came from a detailed assessment using real-world operator data provided by TIM and Bouygues Telecom. The analysis combined real power measurements of deployed video delivery equipment (cache servers and transcoders) with estimations of the unicast infrastructure that would have been necessary without the proposed optimizations.
Key elements of the methodology included:
- Data Sources: The assessment relied on streaming traffic data from 2024, with forecasts for 2030, the evolution of multicast ABR (mABR) technology penetration in user devices (home gateways and set-top boxes), and the number of streaming services using private CDNs.
- Hybrid Model: The model integrated real measurements with theoretical calculations to estimate the impact of the new delivery model on hardware and energy requirements.
- Functional Testing: To validate the approach, end-to-end tests were conducted on public networks, involving content from TF1 and RAI, network operators (Bouygues Telecom and TIM), CDN provider Edgio, and technology provider Broadpeak. These tests verified smooth integration and interoperability.
- Analysis Platform: Humans Not Robots (HNR) processed the data and presented the results on dashboards for further analysis (see example below).
This methodology enabled a comprehensive evaluation of how the proposed content delivery model could reduce traffic, energy use, and hardware requirements.
Results – What We Found Out.
The assessment produced significant findings, indicating that a more sustainable live streaming could be achieved without compromising user experience:
- Traffic Reduction: Live streaming traffic peaks could be reduced by 55% to 85%, lessening the load on the network during high-demand events.
- Hardware Requirements: Optimization could lead to an 85% to 95% decrease in necessary hardware, substantially cutting costs for CSPs.
- Energy Savings: The new approach could result in an 80% to 90% reduction in energy consumption for live streaming.
- User and Provider Impact: These optimizations wouldn’t negatively affect the quality of experience (QoE) for end-users or require changes from content providers.
- Financial Benefits: Lower hardware and energy costs would translate into immediate returns on investment, making the model financially attractive for broad adoption. Additionally, operators would gain further revenue opportunities through network capacity sharing.
The results demonstrated that the mutualized delivery model and mABR technology offer a commercially viable path to more sustainable live streaming.
Path Forward: Next Steps and Challenges
The solution devised and tested in this project successfully showed the potential for a more sustainable live streaming, but for now it remains a model that hasn’t yet been deployed at a large-scale . Several steps will help move this from a proof of concept to widespread industry adoption.
Incremental Approach to Improvement
- Current Focus (“Today”): We measured key data points and used theoretical modeling to estimate savings in hardware and energy.
- Next Phase (“Tomorrow”): Expanding the dataset and refining predictions to understand cost scaling over time.
- Long-Term Goal (“In the Future”): Enhancing measurement accuracy and employing causal analysis for scenario planning and further cost reduction.
Model Considerations
- The assessment is based on simulations and testing, not yet on real-life deployments at scale. This limits the generalizability of the results to broader, more diverse network conditions.
- More extensive field measurements involving new partners will be necessary to validate the model’s assumptions.
Evolving the Model: What’s Next
- Increase Field Measurements: Collaborate with additional partners for more in-depth, real-world data collection.
- A/B Testing and Data Analysis: Perform causal analysis to identify further areas for optimization and energy savings.
- Expand Scope: Broaden the model beyond CDNs to include other network components like the backbone, access networks, and end-user devices.
- Reduce Barriers to Adoption:
- Use standardized network APIs from the OpenAPI framework.
- Encourage native integration of multicast ABR agents in video players instead of relying on SDKs.
- Improve compatibility with stream personalization, such as targeted advertising.
By addressing these limitations and implementing the next steps, the project could drive the industry toward more sustainable streaming practices while delivering cost and energy benefits for CSPs and content providers, alike.
Conclusion: Moving Toward a Sustainable Future for Live Streaming
The Sustainable Live Streaming Catalyst demonstrated that a reimagined content delivery model can dramatically reduce energy use and costs without compromising quality. By mutualizing network infrastructure and leveraging multicast ABR technology, the project achieved significant reductions in traffic peaks, hardware requirements, and energy consumption. The results offer a compelling case for CSPs and content providers to rethink how live streaming is delivered, to reshape their relationships, making sustainability not just an ideal but a practical and financially attractive reality.
This project is just the start. To truly realize the model’s potential, we need real-world deployments and ongoing optimization. A stronger collaboration between content providers and operators is essential. By bringing more partners together and enhancing measurement and integration, we can pave the way for a more sustainable streaming.
Let’s discuss how your organization can join the next phase and lead the charge in energy-efficient, cost-effective live streaming worldwide.
