As streaming platforms compete in an increasingly crowded market, delivering a seamless and engaging user experience (UX) remains a top priority. At the same time, there’s a growing awareness across the industry of the environmental impact of video streaming, prompting many services to explore how sustainability can be embedded into product design.
But this raises a critical question: how can services integrate sustainability into the front end of their applications without compromising the high-quality UX that users have come to expect?
Sustainability and user experience don’t have to be in conflict. Thoughtful, user-centric design can engage and educate users to make energy-efficient choices that don’t disrupt their journey. By aligning sustainability goals with UX strategy, through data-informed decisions, smart defaults, and efficient UI behaviours, OTT services can continue to innovate while also making a positive environmental impact.
Factoring sustainability into design considerations
UX design plays an important role in energy consumption because there are a number of practical measures that service engineers can take at product design level to reduce energy consumed by the end user. And crucially, this can be done without impacting quality. OTT product design can also be used to empower consumers to make more sustainable decisions about how they view content.
Last year, Accedo partnered with cloud analytics platform for sustainability, Humans Not Robots, to develop the ECOFLOW project under the IBC2024 Accelerator programme. ECOFLOW was designed to help the industry understand energy use of key components in the streaming value chain and understand how they perform in different environments. The project findings lay the groundwork for developing energy-efficient streaming strategies and sustainable audience engagement, while also enhancing our understanding of how OTT service design can reduce emissions.
What the data tells us
A key part of the ECOFLOW project involved conducting laboratory tests to evaluate the impact of various factors on the energy consumption of end devices. The findings provide valuable insights into how different types of displays respond to various scenarios. Interestingly, the act of streaming itself accounts for only a small proportion of overall household energy consumption, whereas the type of device and display has a far greater impact on energy consumption.
Decisions made by OEM’s also have a huge impact on end users’ energy consumption. For example, many streaming devices default to Auto-HDR due to manufacturer policy decisions, which significantly increases energy consumption without offering substantial benefits. Rendering SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) content as HDR (High Dynamic Range) can increase energy usage by between 10 and 30%, so by switching to SDR content or by not having HDR enabled or using Audio Only mode, significant power savings can be made.
It is also true that the brightness of the room can result in significant power variation on displays, potentially resulting in up to double power consumption in bright conditions. Therefore, emissive or high-dimming-zone displays show great potential for energy savings.
Sustainable UX design
Decisions made on UI and UX design can and do directly impact energy consumption. For example, images add visual appeal but increase page weight and energy consumption. Therefore, it’s essential that images are optimised with proper scaling, efficient formats and effective compression.
We know that energy efficiency differs across devices, so to maximise energy savings, engineers need to introduce features that detect the user’s streaming device and display and either switch to or suggest energy-efficient settings. For example, user prompts could suggest switching to more energy efficient devices, turning on energy saving mode, or lowering backlight settings.
It’s important however to recognise that the user is in a passive state and focused on the content rather than the system settings, so any features designed to support sustainability must enhance rather than detract from the viewing experience. Care must be taken to ensure such features are intelligent, non-intrusive, relevant and rewarding to the viewer.
As is evident in research by BBC R&D, for energy savings strategies to be effective, they also need to take into account human behaviour because user actions can negate intended energy savings. Therefore, consumer education is another critical factor and could well have a more significant impact on energy savings than technical measures. Encouraging users to watch in dimmer rooms, use devices optimised for streaming, and be mindful about usage of high-energy consumption devices like gaming consoles may all have a big impact.
Greater insight is needed
The video industry’s approach to energy saving must align not only with user experience, but must also support industry growth and enable services to scale sustainably. To achieve this, we need deeper insight into the energy consumption of streaming media pipelines. In light of this, Accedo will again be working with Humans Not Robots and other partners including ITV and the EBU on phase two of the ECOFLOW project, which has been accepted under the IBC2025 Accelerator project.
The new project aims to address the lack of visibility and accountability in the energy consumption of streaming media pipelines by creating a digital twin to simulate streaming pipelines and their energy consumption. It will also directly engage platform product teams to understand barriers and motivations for adopting energy-saving objectives. With continued collaboration across the industry, the future holds exciting and impactful possibilities.
