Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt start €3.3million climate-friendly video streaming platform research project GAIA.

Bitmovin, a leading provider of video streaming infrastructure, and the University of Klagenfurt announced they will collaborate on a two-year joint research project worth €3.3million to develop a climate-friendly adaptive video streaming platform called ‘GAIA’. The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) will co-fund the project, providing an initial €460,000 in funding for the first year.

Project ‘GAIA’ aims to identify ways to improve sustainability and reduce energy consumption across the end-to-end video streaming chain by

• Enabling energy awareness and accountability, including benchmarking and predicting energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across the entire delivery chain, from content creation and server-side encoding to video transmission and client-side rendering.
• Reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions through advanced analytics and optimizations on all phases of the video delivery chain.

The research project ‘GAIA’ is the fourth time Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt have been awarded funding for a research project and will start on the 1st of October 2022.

Christian Timmerer, Associate Professor at the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC) at the University of Klagenfurt and Laboratory Director, added: “Everyone should be doing their part to reduce their carbon footprint, including the video streaming industry. The partnership between Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt helps address the industry’s need for more accurate ways to quantify and predict energy consumption and emitted greenhouse gases across the video delivery chain, helping ensure the industry is doing its part to become more sustainable.”

Radu Prodan, Professor at the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC) at the University of Klagenfurt and Laboratory Director, concluded: “This is a significant investment into energy management strategies for video streaming technologies at a time when online video traffic is growing exponentially.  Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt are long-time collaborators, and we look forward to working together once again to help advance sustainability across the video delivery chain.”