The 11th Way to "Go Green with Video"

I received a white paper last month called “10 Ways to Go Green with Video.” The paper is pretty good, and cites many of the familiar arguments about video in the Green economy—namely that it can replace carbon-intensive activities like plane travel, automobile commuting, on-site training, and so on.

These are valid arguments, of course, but there’s a dirty (no pun) little secret in this kind of thinking. Any video application that you deploy requires electricity (not only to create, edit & view the video, but to send the video packets through many routers to span the networks).

Unfortunately, most electricity is still generated using coal and other carbon-intensive fossil fuels. In 2004, coal-fired electricity generation accounted for 41% of world electricity supply; by 2030, its share is projected to be 45% U.S. Energy Information Administration (PDF).

That’s a 4% increase over 26 years, which doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you consider that the projected consumption of electricity worldwide is expected to grow from 16,000 to over 30,000 billion kilowatt hours by 2030, that translates to a lot of coal. In fact, Google is so concerned about future energy costs & sources that they’ve proposed hosting their data centers on ocean barges to harness wave energy.

I’m not a carbon scientist, so I can’t say whether the carbon emitted to make the additional electricity required for increased global use of video is more, less, or equal to that generated by airplane travel, automobiles, etc.

But I do know a thing or two about video, so I’d like to suggest an 11th way to “Go Green with Video”: Use Better Video Compression.

At its core, video compression is about efficiency. Yes, better compression results in better video quality, but it achieves quality through smarter allocation of available data in the video stream.

But an aspect of compression that doesn’t get mentioned often is this: Good compression also reduces the amount of computing power required to play back (decode) the video. For example, our new On2 VP8 codec uses up to 50% fewer processor cycles to decode than other advanced video formats. This means less electricity to play video, less electricity to play higher resolutions, and more hours of video playback between battery recharges on mobile devices.

This isn’t to say that On2 Video will singlehandedly solve the world’s energy problems, but on such a massive scale as this, every little bit adds up.

A 12th way to go green with video is this: Do it in hardware. But that’s a topic for another day.