How Norsk Factors Sustainability into Codec Deployment
A number of factors impact codec deployment strategies and decision-making for live streaming, and particularly for a company like Norsk that has been involved with the Greening of Streaming organization from its inception, sustainability and power consumption are key considerations. Norsk’s Steve Strong explains how to encode both on-prem and in the cloud with sustainability front of mind while balancing that with cost and other ever-present concerns in this discussion with Streaming Media 2025 conference chair Andy Beach in this clip from the latest Streaming Media Connect.
Density as the Deciding Factor
Media and AI strategist Andy Beach begins the conversation by mentioning that sustainability is an aspect of trade-offs in live streaming besides latency and cost. “I know Norsk has been a strong proponent in Greening of Streaming and the elements that go in there,” he says. “[H]ow does that impact the architecture and the deployments you’re doing?”
Norsk CTO Steve Strong asserts, “Probably the single biggest thing that customers are looking for when they’re going through all the various choices—you’ve got your quality, price, energy, et cetera—I suspect the single biggest thing that ends up being a deciding factor is density. It’s how much you can cram onto a single machine” for on-prem. But for cloud, it’s “much more interesting,” Strong says. He points to the expense per hour of something like a NVIDIA box, noting, “If you can have that fully loaded, well that’s great. You’re probably doing fine. If you’re event-based and you fully load it and then half of your events stop and now you’ve got a machine that’s half-loaded that you’re paying big money for, that’s probably not so interesting. So you get a slight challenge on the cloud in terms of making sure that things stay fully utilized.”
Because of this potential problem, Norsk’s cloud customers “actually run pure CPU for that purpose because it means they can load each machine to the top of that instance, and then as soon as the event’s over, they can turn it off so that they’re saving their money,” Strong explains. The arrival of new ASIC-based encoders for the cloud may change that, he notes. “So things like NETINT on the Akamai cloud, the pricing is much more aggressive than the NVIDIA I suspect, because the demand for NVIDIA with all the AI processing is so high, they can charge top dollar for that.”
Taking the Greening of Streaming Seriously
Strong describes helping to found the Greening of Streaming organization “because we wanted the industry as a whole to take the problem seriously and make sure people were measuring and make sure people had science behind it, and it wasn’t just greenwashing and making up numbers that made no sense.” He suspects that Norsk customers approve of the idea, but believes they’re not likely to make a purchasing decision based on how green the codec it’s on is. He reiterates that density is the deciding factor, especially if a customer “can get that great density at low power”; in the end, it’s all about cost.
A Starting Point
Beach wants to give Norsk credit because he feels that sustainability in live is a difficult question to mull over. “[T]he fact that you’re getting so much metrics out there and making us think about accountability for it is a great starting place,” he praises Strong.
Strong adds that the conversation did indeed need to get started, but it’s anyone’s guess where it goes from here.
Beach agrees. “[O]f course it makes absolute sense that cost is still a driving factor,” he notes, “but I think being able to look at those [sustainability] numbers alongside of it gives you the ability or at least gives the customer the ability to plan and think about what the overall implications are for that [environmental] footprint long-term.”
Join conference chair Andy Beach and other streaming media experts in person Oct. 6–8 in Santa Monica, CA, for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media 2025. Registration is open!
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