Raising Awareness on Sustainability in Media Tech

This week, I had the great pleasure of speaking at an event hosted by Sony Pictures Entertainment in Los Angeles.  The SPE Tech Downloads is a 3-day internal seminar style session where technology vendors are invited to speak about their latest and greatest work.  Open to the entire SPE staff around the world, it’s an excellent opportunity for knowledge sharing around interesting topics like blockchain/NFT’s, virtual production, post-production, and the cloud. 

I was thrilled that these tech execs also included a session on sustainability.  It’s not a topic that gets a lot of internal attention at these sorts of events.  Sustainability often gets overlooked as an added expense or as some far-off CSR (corporate social responsibility) effort that doesn’t impact the techies.  But that is definitely not the case at Sony.  The 90-minute session included me, Mick Broderick from Humans Not Robots, as well as John Rego, Sony’s Vice President of Sustainability.  Between the three of us we spoke on the fundamentals of sustainability what it means to a business (me), the tools that make it easier to manage within a media tech environment (Mick), and an interview between John Rego and Bill Baggelaar (Sony CTO) about Sony’s commitment to sustainability, particularly in light of the Movielabs 2030 Vision, a guiding roadmap for the studios. 

For years, Sony has been a leader in sustainability.  SPE was among the founders of the Sustainable Production Alliance which along with the Producers Guild (PGA) developed the Green Production Guide, serving since 2010 as the guide for green productions. 

Content Creation is pretty well covered in terms of sustainability.  Organizations like albert (UK) and the Green Production Guide (US), provide productions guidance to produce content in as green a way as possible. 

When we talk about Content Manipulation and Distribution, however, there is still work to be done.  Manipulation is the catch-all for everything that happens to content post-wrap, and Distribution covers off how content reaches the end-user.  In these two domains, we rely heavily on digital steps in the workflow.  How much energy is being used to edit that episodic content in the cloud?  How much energy is being used to stream that football match to consumers?  This is the space that needs more work to better understand the measurements for baseline energy usage so that alternative choices can be determined.  It is a growing area of interest so that studios can determine how best to meet their content creator needs, as well as keeping to their sustainability targets.   

I was happy to speak at this event and to interact with the Sony team about their concerns.  Because even as a leader in sustainability, there is still more to be done.