Sustainability was one of the big topics at NAB Show last year, and this year the topic has matured within a media environment during technological and regulatory change.
“We are classically progressing on our sustainability journey as an industry,” said Barbara Lange, principal and CEO of Kibol21, a consultancy firm focused on guiding media tech organizations on their path to sustainability.
Lange said this was particularly true for companies coming out of Europe or doing business with European media companies. The EU has a new mandate called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which is a disclosure framework that requires larger companies to begin reporting sustainability metrics assessing the impact of companies on people and the environment along with possible financial risks.
Lange said larger organizations need to start gathering the data, and they need to have their supply chain gathering the data. The largest companies will have to apply the new rules for the first time in the 2024 financial year, for reports published in 2025. Small and medium enterprises will be required to report over the next few years.
According to Lange, a smaller NAB Show vendor that wants to supply one of the companies facing CSRD reporting needs to have its sustainability ducks in a row when approaching a supply chain management or RFP process: “Even if you’re not bound by CSRD, if you’re a software company from Portland that wants to do business with a European company, you’ll most likely have to comply with their procurement supply chain code of conduct.”
L-R: Barbara Lange, Johannes Sinnhuber, Danna Mann, James Taylor, Dr. Ciro Noronha, and Chris Braehler.
Beyond CSRD, other mandates are developing. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has evolving sustainability rules of yet-to-be-determined scope. California also passed its own legislation late last year that could be important for anybody doing business in Hollywood, although the implementation of the bills may be delayed by the state’s budget woes.
One company trying to stay well ahead of the curve for any possible sustainability metrics is U.K.-based InSync. CEO James Taylor said the company is continually refining its reporting practices, ensuring adaptability to emerging regulatory landscapes. At NAB Show the company’s MCC-HD2 motion-compensated frame rate converter — developed in collaboration with FOR-A — is being billed as an energy-saver in a compact form.
“InSync proactively prepares for sustainability reporting,” said Taylor. “We meticulously track and document energy usage throughout the product lifecycle, collaborate closely with suppliers to ensure transparency, and integrate sustainability considerations into product design.”
Christopher Braehler, vice president of product for SDVI, said that customers are bringing up concerns around cost and reporting quite often. “We had one client that weighed reporting at 20 percent in their RFP and discussed it as a factor they use to decide which vendor to work with. Two separate European broadcasters also raised these concerns, with one asking us to contribute reporting to their overall business sustainability goals.”
SDVI is very proactive on sustainability. Since 2021 the company has provided each customer with a report on its footprint resulting from the usage of SDVI products, and in 2022, it launched its Net-Zero Supply Chains initiative, which relies on purchasing carbon offsets. Braehler himself won an individual award at the inaugural NAB Show Excellence in Sustainability Awards last year at NAB Show. This year’s event happens today on the Main Stage, 1 p.m.
Sustainability is about more than mandates and metrics; it’s also about responsibility and often just a desire to do well. It can also save money.
For its part, Cobalt Digital has considered the lifetime of a typical product — often 10 years or more — and determined that the best environmental impact they can have is to design products that use the least amount of power and cooling.
“We design using the latest generation FPGA devices, which are significantly more energy efficient than general-purpose CPUs, said Dr. Ciro Noronha, Cobalt CTO. “Our products can do the job at a fraction of the energy cost of doing it on a general-purpose CPU.”
Linda Tadic, founder and CEO of Digital Bedrock said that companies are definitely starting to realize being sustainable can actually save money. “It isn’t necessarily more expensive to try to be green, to try to be sustainable.”
Tadic mentioned that best practices and guidelines suggested by industry organizations like the Greening of Streaming group and the Green Production Guide can often be cost-cutting, particularly those that limit travel costs through remote alternatives.
For decades transmitter companies have had energy savings front and center in marketing campaigns. Johannes Sinnhuber, product manager, Transmitter Systems, Rohde & Schwarz, said that the recent rise in the cost of energy has brought efficiency to the top of the agenda. Cost savings, doing good and meeting regulatory frameworks are again intertwined.
“Over the lifecycle of a transmitter, 99% of carbon emissions result from power consumption during operation alone,” said Sinnhuber. “Looking to energy-efficient transmitters is paramount in reducing power consumption, lowering energy bills, and ultimately reducing the carbon footprint to achieve sustainability goals.”
As a German manufacturer Rohde is also subject to meeting CSRD reporting, so the vendor has actively enhanced its existing sustainability data collection process within its business and throughout its supply chain.
TAG Video Systems began its sustainability journey in 2023, and in 2024 the company has progressed to measuring and reporting all employee, office, shipping and expense-based emissions, according to Danna Mann, TAG’s director of marketing.
Mann said that while customers rarely ask about specific standards reporting, they are very interested in the company’s sustainability program and how they measure emissions. “TAG has made a commitment to measuring our carbon emissions as accurately as possible,” said Mann. “Efficiency or smart solutions is in our DNA. We are determined to achieve transparency when it comes to our footprint, and we want to provide our customers with that transparency. The first step in reducing and offsetting is knowing.”
Sustainable Exhibitor Initiative
One sustainability-related item you might notice on some booths is the logo of the Sustainable Exhibitor Initiative. This is a collaboration between NAB Show and the Media Tech Sustainability Series (MTSS) where exhibitors who demonstrate a commitment to sustainability within their show presence can be recognized as a sustainable exhibitor. MTSS scored exhibitors based on their responses to an online sustainability questionnaire.
Copyright NAB 2024.
