One of the most important aspects of the latest Greening of Streaming Watt Lab publication is not just what it measures, but what those measurements enable next. This is where the work of Greening of Streaming (GoS) strongly aligns with the goals of the EXIGENCE project.
Shared Starting Point: Service‑Level Energy Measurement
Both Greening of Streaming and EXIGENCE start from the same fundamental observation:
the energy footprint of streaming cannot be understood – or improved – without service‑level measurements. These service-level measurements are represented by end-to-end measurements for the video delivery chain: encoding, packaging, caching, transport, decoding and display.
The Watt Lab Hackathons report used test sequence and fine-grained power measurements, Greening of Streaming analysed how bitrate, resolution, and content characteristics affect energy consumption across the streaming chain. EXIGENCE builds on similar conclusion from a network and service perspective: the environmental posture of a connected device cannot be assessed without accounting for the remote services it depends on, such as video streaming workflows.
This shared emphasis on measured, end‑to‑end energy data is not accidental. EXIGENCE explicitly identifies Greening of Streaming’s measurement framework and open measurement platform as relevant and complementary to its own objectives.
Bridging Engineering and Behaviour
Greening of Streaming has traditionally focused on engineering decisions: codecs, encoding ladders, packaging, CDNs, and devices. EXIGENCE extends this by explicitly modelling human behaviour and acceptance.
EXIGENCE user‑acceptance framework combines:
- Mean Opinion Score: Perceived quality loss from lower video bitrates
- Individual “greenness” factors: Reflects how much each user personally values sustainability in their viewing experience
- Social Green-Wellbeing: Captures the collective impact of eco-conscious user behaviour.
This creates a natural division of focus areas:
- Greening of Streaming provides verified, repeatable measurements showing where energy is actually consumed and which parameters matter most.
- EXIGENCE turns those insights into actionable incentives and service‑level controls, aligned with both sustainability goals and user satisfaction.
In this sense, the Watt Lab findings are not an endpoint – they are an input to systems like EXIGENCE that aim to operationalise sustainability at scale.
Avoiding Greenwashing Through Measured Data
Both initiatives also share a strong stance against greenwashing. Greening of Streaming explicitly commits to verifiable data and real‑world measurements, not estimates or marketing claims. EXIGENCE mirrors this by requiring credible, accountable, and traceable eco‑data across multiple authority domains before optimisation or incentivisation can take place.
This alignment matters in a regulatory context. In many jurisdictions value chain reporting is mandatory and explicit reference to the GHG protocol is mentioned. The GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard (also referred to as the Scope 3 Standard) provides requirements and guidance for companies and other organisations to prepare and publicly report a GHG emissions inventory that includes indirect emissions resulting from value chain activities (i.e., scope 3 emissions). Potentially real-time measurements can be added in future versions of the GHG protocol.
EXIGENCE provides an architecture for real time measurements of eco-data for value chain services. In brief it adds an agent to each service domain, that connects the domains that have a service relation to each other.
Figure 1: EXIGENCE functional architecture
And the agents connect to domain services, resources and an orchestrator in their respective domain. [EXIGENCE functional architecture]
The Greening of Streaming measurement structure also recognises the different domains, it uses a central measurement system collecting the energy readings from each domain, the advantage being an easier setup for conducting the measurements. To bring this to real world implementations, the EXIGENCE architecture works better as no centralised system is necessary.
Initial Interpretation
Based on Greening of Streaming Hackathon results, an initial interpretation can be made. Resolution strongly affects encoding power (55% of the variance), not packaging. Bitrate had a significant effect on both encoding and packaging power, with the bitrate impact on packaging power being fairly substantial.
GoS Coverage of the End-to-end Streaming Workflows
In typical broadcast scenarios where a stream of live content is watched by many, the encode and packaging is utilised by many, thus the contribution of energy usage to each user for this is low (shared by the millions), the choice for HDR or not is of more relevance. In scenarios with limited views the encode energy is a significant part of the overall energy used per view.
From Insight to Systemic Change
Taken together, the latest Greening of Streaming publication and the EXIGENCE project illustrate a broader shift in how the industry can approach sustainability:
- From theoretical models → measured energy signatures
- From isolated optimisations → end‑to‑end service assessment
- From passive efficiency gains → active, incentivised behaviour change
The Watt Lab report shows what matters most in technical terms. EXIGENCE addresses how those insights can be translated into real‑world change – across networks, services, and users.
Authors
TNO
Arian Koster Creative Innovator in Sustainable ICT, with extended experience in the media field. Specialties: Innovation, IPR, Patents, Building roadmaps, product management, TV, agile, Less, product owner, cross domain alignment, vendor management, project intake, technology development, IPTV, video on demand, MPEG, Digital TV, Video on Demand, authentication, video coding, streaming, strategy, Waterfall to Agile transition, Product Ownership Pioneer of MPEG revolution.
TNO
Sarah Lim Choi Keung is a project manager at TNO, focusing on ICT research projects in the areas of next-generation networking technologies, including 5G/6G, cloud-based, radio and immersive networking. Her interests extend to technology for verticals, sustainability and technology policy. With a background in Computer Science, Sarah has research, teaching and project management experience in health informatics while working at the University of Birmingham and University of Warwick in the UK.