albert was thrilled to attend Tuesday’s IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) Kickstart event at the IET London, on the banks of The Thames. The building was home to the very first BBC broadcasts, starting in 1923. This week it hosted a celebration of the IBC Accelerators programme which brings together broadcasters, tech companies and innovators to brainstorm and experiment with new ways of thinking about media.
Posted on 13th February 2023
IBC Kickstart shows the industry is ready to level up in sustainability
albert attended IBC's 2023 Accelerator Kickstart Day on the 7th of February. Read on to see our insights and thoughts about the day.
Meet the winner of 2022's Accelerator
In a very close race for the winning IBC Accelerator project of the 2022 the winner was ‘5G Production…In the Middle Of Nowhere’, which trialled a remarkable ‘5G network in a box’ which allowed for portable live broadcast from locales without connectivity – including the middle of Kenya, New Zealand countryside and the Scottish Highlands.
In addition to celebrating 2022’s winner and presenting an industry forum for the 2023 IBC Accelerator cohort to pitch their ideas, the event highlighted sustainability. IBC Conference producer Jaisica Lapsiwala promised that sustainable thinking and practice would be a key feature of the Future Zone at the big IBC show in September and would also inform all the work done by the incoming group of IBC Accelerator teams.
Launching the LESS Accord
Greening of Streaming head Dom Robinson also delivered a talk on his organisations successes in bringing together video delivery technologists to identify efficiencies and to get to the truth about where power consumption happens in the streaming workflow. The organisation used the occasion to launch its new Low Energy Sustainable (LESS) Accord, which asks the industry to adopt less power-intensive low to mid quality streams as the default, rather than always pushing out the highest quality everywhere, all at once.
In an announcement on the Greening Of Streaming website, the org said: ‘The idea behind the LESS Accord is to ‘give permission’ to ask out loud what many engineers in the industry already instinctively, privately think and to explore how we might be able to deliver services that fulfil the consumers expectations without…creating inappropriate, expensive, unsustainable and unnecessary energy demands for no benefit to the viewer.’
Click here (https://www.greeningofstreaming.org/less) for more information on the Greening Of Streaming’s new Less Accord.
An industry at the edge
In attendance from the albert team were Junior Comms Manager Órlaith Rogers and former Head of Comms and Events Neal Romanek. Both ended up fielding a wide array of concerns and questions about media industry sustainability.
Conversations with sports professionals brought up how much UK sports broadcasters were making efforts at sustainable practice throughout the broadcast chain, while their US sports industry counterparts tended to be a bit more sluggish.
Virtual production facilities, beginning to boom in the wake of covid lockdowns and travel restrictions, are now looking toward a future where they become a go to option for companies seeking scope and production value without needing a lot of physical infrastructure. One of the companies albert spoke to underlined the need virtual production facilities had for clear guidance about how to measure their own carbon footprints and how they should advise their clients.
A virtual production studio might be working with a feature film company one day, a light entertainment programme the next day, and then a commercial shoot the next. Each of these will have their own particular sustainability and carbon footprint mandates, based on agreements and pledges their various stakeholders have adopted. Virtual production studios, precisely because they are so versatile, have to negotiate a wide, unpredictable spectrum of customer concerns and queries – and they want help.
The albert comms team were struck by how genuinely concerned – and enthusiastic – Kickstart Day attendees were about the imminent shifts required to reverse the global environmental crisis. But despite the solid scientific consensus about what steps need to be taken, there was a lack of unified thinking and little sense of coordinated action.