The recent TVBEurope article on Eurovision’s push toward a “greener, more cinematic” production is encouraging. It highlights meaningful steps: LED and laser-based lighting, reduced conventional lighting loads, electric transport, and more efficient production design. These are all important advances. But if the media and entertainment industry is serious about sustainability, we also need to be honest with ourselves: green production alone is not enough.
Production is only the beginning of the story
Today’s content workflows extend far beyond the stage, studio, or outside broadcast compound. Modern media operations now rely on complex digital infrastructures that include post-production, rendering, cloud processing, localisations, encoding, storage, mastering, archiving, content delivery networks, streaming platforms, telecom systems, and billions of consumer devices.
Eurovision itself demonstrates the scale of this challenge. The event regularly reaches more than 160 million viewers globally, while also generating massive digital engagement across streaming and social platforms. At that level of audience scale, sustainability efforts must extend beyond physical production and consider how content is processed, distributed, streamed, and consumed.
This is where the media industry still has work to do
Production sustainability often receives the most attention because it is tangible and easy to communicate. Cameras, lighting, transportation, and stage design are highly visible parts of the workflow. But there are many operational energy demands within the rest of the workflow.
Higher-resolution formats require additional processing and storage. Cloud-based workflows increase data movement and compute requirements. AI-enabled tools introduce new processing demands. Streaming distribution relies on large-scale data centre and network infrastructure operating continuously around the globe.
None of this means innovation should slow down. It means sustainability must evolve into a broader engineering and operational discussion across the entire media workflow. This is one of the core ideas behind the Media Climate Accord (MCA), an industry initiative designed to encourage a more holistic approach towards a common net zero target across the media industry.
The MCA framework looks at sustainability across four interconnected areas of the media workflow:
- Green Production: reducing the environmental impact of physical productions and operations.
- The Efficient Digital Factory: improving efficiency across post-production, rendering, encoding, storage, and cloud-based workflows.
- Sustainable Distribution: addressing the energy demands of streaming platforms, CDNs, telecom infrastructure, and data centers.
- Conscientious Consumption: considering the role of devices, playback technologies, and audience viewing behaviours.
This systems-level approach highlights that sustainability is not isolated to a single department or workflow stage. It should impact engineering decisions, infrastructure strategy, procurement, operations, and standards development. The media industry has a strong history of collaboration and technical interoperability. Broadcasters, technology vendors, streaming providers, and standards organisations have repeatedly shown they can work together to solve complex technical challenges.
The next phase of sustainability progress will require the same mindset.
Eurovision’s sustainability initiatives should absolutely be recognised and celebrated. But they should also serve as a reminder that the future challenge is larger than production alone. The opportunity now is to build a media ecosystem that considers sustainability across the full journey of content, from creation to consumption.
