Austrian research promotion agency FFG will co-found the project to make video streaming sustainable over the next two years.
Klagenfurt-Austria, 6th October – 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 €3.3million 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
END
About Bitmovin
Bitmovin is a leading provider of video infrastructure for global digital media companies and service providers. The company has been at the forefront of industry innovation and all major developments in the digital video streaming industry.
Bitmovin built the world’s first commercial adaptive streaming player and deployed the first software-defined encoding service that runs on any cloud platform. Its cloud-native technology offers the most flexible and scalable media encoding, playback, and analytics solutions available with unparalleled device reach, ease of integration, and world class customer support.
Bitmovin customers benefit from optimized operations, reduced time-to-market, and the best viewer experience possible. Bitmovin is headquartered in San Francisco, California and has major offices in Vienna, Klagenfurt, Austria as well as London, Berlin and Denver. The company has over 400 customers across the globe including ClassPass, BBC, fuboTV, Hulu, and Discovery. For more information, visit www.bitmovin.com.
About University of Klagenfurt
The University of Klagenfurt, founded in 1970, is one of the best young universities in the world (THE Young University Rankings). Around 12,000 students pursue their studies and research at the university, and around 2,000 of them are foreign students. Roughly 1,500 employees work on the campus in the south of Austria. The area of research strength “Networked and Autonomous Systems” is one of the most important research priorities at the University of Klagenfurt.
The University of Klagenfurt has been running the Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA in collaboration with Bitmovin since October 2019. The team of researchers is developing new methods for the delivery and playback of live and on-demand video via the Internet using HTTP Adaptive Streaming technology. For more information, see www.aau.at/en.
Press Contacts
Zoe Mumba, Global PR and Communications Manager
WithPR on behalf of Bitmovin