The Super Bowl as a Sustainability Lens for Live Broadcasting
Every year, the Super Bowl represents the pinnacle of live television. It is a showcase of the latest and greatest in broadcast engineering: hundreds of cameras, sophisticated mobile production, ultra-reliable networks, cloud-enabled workflows, and streaming delivery at enormous scale. The quality expectations are uncompromising, and the execution is extraordinary.
It is, without question, one of the most impressive technology productions in the world. This year’s broadcast was a powerful reminder of just how far the industry has come.
And that is precisely why the Super Bowl offers a useful moment for reflection. If this is what the industry can achieve at its technical best, how might we also look at it through a sustainability lens?
Sustainable intention
Discussions about sustainability around major sporting events often focus on what happens outside the broadcast: travel, venues, food, fan experience, or merchandising. Those issues matter. But they can overshadow another critical dimension — the broadcast and streaming systems that bring the event to hundreds of millions of viewers.
As highlighted in a recent SVG article, broadcasting the Super Bowl is inherently energy-intensive. Yet despite the sophistication of the technology involved, we still struggle to answer a basic question with confidence: how much energy does it actually take to deliver this experience?
Part of the reason is that sustainability conversations in media have often been framed in the wrong way. Sustainability can often be about abstract carbon estimates calculated after the fact and disconnected from day-to-day engineering decisions. Sustainability is rarely treated with the same intention and rigor as quality, reliability, or scale.
Why carbon is not the best place to start
Carbon emissions are an important outcome and provide a common reporting language, but they are not the most useful starting point for understanding broadcast operations. Energy is.
Energy can be measured.
Energy can be compared.
Energy can be optimized.
Energy can be saved.
Looking at sustainability through an energy lens opens the door to practical insight. For live sports production, that means beginning to understand energy use across key layers: on-site production, centralized and cloud production, and distribution through broadcast and streaming.
By gaining visibility into where energy is actually being used, we can make smarter choices for future events. Carbon reporting then becomes more accurate — because it is grounded in real operational data.
Quality and sustainability are not in conflict
There is a common assumption that sustainability requires compromising quality. In live sports broadcasting, the opposite is often true.
Smarter camera utilization, more intentional workflow design, reduced duplication, and device-aware streaming delivery can all reduce energy use while maintaining , or improving, reliability and viewer experience. Audiences care about a great game, delivered with excellent picture quality, stability, and low latency. They don’t see inefficiencies behind the scenes.
Sustainability is not about doing less. It is about doing things more intelligently.
Using iconic events as learning opportunities
The Super Bowl is a uniquely complex event with specific constraints and ambitions. It is also a highly visible moment that can spark better questions and experimentation around sustainability.
The same is true for other global sporting events such as the Olympic Games, the World Cup, Formula 1, and many others. These productions push technology to its limits. They are precisely the environments where improved measurement, learning, and refinement can take place, with lessons that carry forward to many other productions.
The real value lies not in labeling any one event a success or failure, but in using these moments to advance more consistent, energy-aware practices and sharing those lessons across the industry.
Bring viewers along
One of the most powerful opportunities is also one of the simplest: telling the story.
Viewers already understand that broadcasting events like the Super Bowl is technologically complex. What they rarely hear is how that complexity is being managed more thoughtfully and why that matters.
Sharing how major broadcasts are engineered more efficiently helps normalize sustainability as part of excellence, not an add-on or a trade-off.
A call to action
Seen this way, the Super Bowl becomes a conversation starter — a moment to imagine a future where sustainability is embedded into planning and production from the outset.
This is the intent behind the Media Climate Accord, which sets a shared industry ambition to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. To get there, we must start by measuring energy and learning from real productions.
Live sporting events offer an ideal opportunity to do exactly that, while raising the bar for both sustainability and technical excellence.
I look forward to working with partners across the industry to help bring these ideas to life.
