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In September 2022, Accedo officially made the commitment to become one of the forerunners of the sustainability movement in the OTT space, and to contribute to the transformation towards a sustainable future - outlined in a previous article.
With our overarching goal to bring sustainable choices to the customer in a more transparent way, we started an initiative to gain a closer understanding of what sustainability means for our customers, as well as key players in our partner ecosystem.
The video streaming industry is generally very much at the beginning of a larger sustainable transformation. This is also apparent when looking at sustainability from the customer point of view: while awareness as an emerging business need is increasingly present, companies are generally in the early stages of implementing a dedicated sustainability strategy.
In order to gain a better understanding of how companies within the OTT service space view and prioritize sustainability in their strategies, and identify emerging trends, we approached a number of existing Accedo One customers and asked them about their current sustainability status, their plans in the near future as well as what they expect from their suppliers. The results showed us some clear tendencies.
The primary focus for this early-stage sustainability evaluation lies broadly on understanding of and reporting on sustainability metrics. All respondents queried are already reporting on their staff’s diversity metrics, and plan to publish a sustainability report in the near future.
Additionally, focus in these initial sustainability stages mainly lies on measuring carbon emissions, as well as on defining a carbon reduction strategy with a potential impact on the product roadmap.
As for the most prestigious sustainability programs, completing the DPP Commited to Sustainability assessment is the first step for customers as well as other suppliers; with some already having completed this task and others planning to do so in the near future.
“When organizations start to think about sustainability it can appear to be complicated and quickly become overwhelming. Our programme is a self assessment initiative to enable any organization in the media industry to make a structured start to manage their environmental impact. By going through the assessment organizations are scored each time and are able to make improvements. The adoption of Committed to Sustainability mark holding suppliers in the Accedo One marketplace is a great way to identify suppliers that are working towards reducing their environmental impact.”
Abdul Hakim, Committed to Sustainability manager and Business Development, DPP
We also asked customers what sustainability considerations they place the most importance on, when it comes to selecting suppliers for their service.
Diversity scored highest on this scale, with all respondents stating it to be very important that a supplier values diversity or is female led. This goes hand in hand with customers already reporting on diversity metrics themselves and thus expecting similar values from their providers.
Another highly valued theme was transparency: customers expect their suppliers to be transparent about progress on their sustainability journey - measuring and reporting their carbon emissions, and publishing a yearly sustainability report.
Other factors included a supplier providing an ESG page and making sustainability commitments such as being a member of the UN Global Compact and having Science Based Targets, as well as suppliers providing sustainability advice to customers.
All respondents stated that they take sustainability metrics into account in their decision-making when evaluating new vendors, and actively ask questions about a supplier’s sustainability efforts in their proposal requests or through direct questions. This trend has also been observed at Accedo, where sustainability and code of ethics questions have become a frequent presence in RFPs.
These responses reveal two crucial themes:
This is where Accedo One and its partner ecosystem can help.
Accedo has already made strides towards reducing carbon emissions, has made a number of official sustainability commitments - namely the DPP “Committed to Sustainability” assessment, is a CDP respondent, has obtained validated Science-Based Targets and became a member of the UN Global Compact - and has recently published its latest Sustainability Report. Our aim is to not only be transparent in our own sustainability journey, but also to elevate the sustainability status of our partners.
In the following section, we’ll outline our work with four selected partners covering different aspects of our ecosystem - from key components in creating a video streaming application, to sustainable product choices and reducing carbon emissions:
Brightcove is a pioneering company specializing in providing cloud-based solutions for managing, delivering, and monetizing video content across various platforms.
Brightcove already started its sustainability journey through introducing an ESG programme focused on human rights, ethical business conduct and workplace experience. Sustainability is also a topic in terms of selecting green buildings as office locations, and reducing employees’ commuting footprint by enabling remote work.
With Brightcove being a key partner in providing the video streaming infrastructure for our Accedo One applications, and being committed to sustainability in their long term plans, our aim is to make its sustainability status transparent in the Sustainable Marketplace. As such, Brightcove has completed the DPP committed to Sustainability assessment to formalize its commitment.
Cleeng is a multi-tenant SaaS platform designed for direct-to-consumer video services, and has established itself as a leader in the Subscriber Retention Management.
Cleeng has incorporated a drive for sustainability into its foundational corporate values and code of conduct since its early days, promoting professional work ethics and equality. This dedication is demonstrated in several ways: Cleeng embraces a diverse workforce with 24 different nationalities among its 110 employees, maintaining a balanced representation of 53% men and 47% women, while also ensuring fair compensation practices. Concern for the environment is evident as Cleeng follows a remote-first approach, which effectively reduces its carbon footprint by minimizing commuting and office energy use. Additionally, Cleeng's technological framework relies on eco-friendly solutions from AWS, highlighting its commitment to utilizing innovative resources in harmony with principles of sustainability.
Our work with Cleeng, similar to Brightcove, has centered around synchronizing on our joint commitment to sustainability, and around formalizing Cleeng’s commitment. Thus, Cleeng has also completed the DPP Committed to Sustainability survey, elevating its status in the Sustainable Marketplace to a sustainable CRM provider.
Cleeng's dedication to sustainability remains strong, as is evident by their involvement in the DPP assessment. This participation will allow Cleeng to measure the progress of its ESG program and identify areas for improvement. The forthcoming DPP survey results hold great potential, offering valuable insights that will help refine strategies and shape sustainability efforts more precisely. Cleeng will further raise awareness and engagement across its organization. With these valuable discoveries in hand, Cleeng's commitment to driving sustainability initiatives even further stays resolute, cementing its position as a responsible leader in the industry.
Humans Not Robots helps data-heavy businesses operate more sustainably and efficiently through its workflow observability and analytics platform, “HNR to ZERO”.
Our work with Humans Not Robots, whom we have been in a close collaboration with since May 2023, covers a slightly different angle. Rather than providing an integration for Accedo One customers to run their video service, Humans Not Robots’ products help us to evaluate and optimize Accedo One’s carbon footprint, and ultimately our customers’ emissions.
The HNR to ZERO platform provides companies with a baseline understanding of their carbon footprint, energy consumption and financial costs, enabling them to produce reports and implement efficiencies. The platform’s hourly updated dashboard enables us to view Accedo One’s sustainability related data in near real time, and allows us to action improvements that affect our carbon emissions as needed - while immediately seeing the results of these experiments.
Humans Not Robots obtained the DPP Committed to Sustainability Mark soon after its inception in 2021. It recently upgraded its status to a three leaves rating and it is co-sponsors of the programme, supporting the DPP to promote good practice in environmental sustainability, across the media industry.
The company’s entire ethos is around helping data-heavy businesses operate more sustainably and efficiently, for the benefit of business, people and the planet, and this is reflected in how they run their own business, as documented on HNR’s corporate environmental policy.
An Accedo One Marketplace listing for Humans Not Robots has been added, so any customers who want to track and evaluate their own carbon emissions in more detail can get in touch with Humans Not Robots through our representatives easily.
Bitmovin specializes in providing innovative video infrastructure solutions for online media and streaming industries. Founded in 2013, Bitmovin has established itself as a leader in the field, offering a range of cutting-edge technologies and tools that enable businesses to optimize their video workflows, enhance playback quality, and deliver content seamlessly across various devices and platforms.
The Bitmovin Player integration covers the third Sustainable Marketplace angle: an in-app product or feature that actively reduces an application’s carbon footprint. Bitmovin Player’s ECO Mode helps media companies of every size reduce their carbon footprint generated by video streaming by simply restricting the streamed resolution up to a given max, e.g., 720p, which will still display well on mobile displays without a corresponding loss in quality. Streaming in 720p instead of Ultra HD saves about 10 times the data volume streamed.
Bitmovin also plans to expand the capabilities of ECO Mode by taking into account data from Project GAIA, its multi-million euro research project with the University of Klagenfurt, which aims to make video streaming more sustainable.
Currently, Bitmovin is working on an ECO quality selection algorithm (ABR) and providing energy usage data to viewers, for example, by taking into account screen brightness among other factors. It is also researching the role that playback Analytics can have in sustainability, specifically how it can increase awareness of the energy consumed by video streaming.
Bitmovin’s commitment to sustainability is also reflected in its corporate policy by implementing new travel guidelines for employees and digitizing resources. Bitmovin also advocates for DEI and in the past two years has grown representation of females and people of color in senior management and leadership roles across every department.
With the combined wealth of experience and sustainability commitments, Accedo One’s ecosystem of partners together with Accedo is ideally placed to help customers progress on their sustainability journey. The Sustainable Marketplace is where it all comes together, surfacing the level of information required to support businesses in making sustainable choices.
We’re accomplishing this by adding a number of new features targeted to sustainability into the Accedo One Marketplace.
It is vital for the aspiring customer to be able to understand how mature a supplier is in their sustainability journey - such as the regular publication of a sustainability report, or commitments to official sustainability frameworks. As such, we’ve added a feature to showcase which of the four most widely accepted sustainability programs a partner has committed to. This commitment and whether they publish a sustainability report is shown via the use of badges.
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The five selected sustainability criteria are:
For the customer, this provides a solid level of transparency into the sustainability status of a potential supplier, and brings together a number of different facets of providing a sustainable service.
A supplier can be classed as sustainable having made commitments on a corporate level, but can additionally provide products and services that actively help to reduce the carbon footprint of an OTT service. Of the above named suppliers, Bitmovin Player’s ECO mode and Humans Not Robots’ HNR to ZERO platform fall into this category.
These products and features are labeled with a Sustainable Products badge in the Sustainable Marketplace.
We at Accedo have come a long way in our own sustainability journey, recently achieving a four leaves classification on the DPP survey - and we strive to share our knowledge and learnings with customers desiring to make sustainable choices.
To help our customers get off to a good start, we have added the option of booking a ‘Get started with sustainability’ workshop with an Accedo representative, in which we will help the customer to work through the intricacies of checking all the marks of developing a sustainable service.
Finally, the page that holds it all together: through one click on a “Sustainability” tab, the customer is able to view a breakdown of the different sustainability criteria, and can browse through suppliers and products that match their needs.
As customer requirements for transparency in sustainability criteria evolve, so will the Sustainable Marketplace. The industry is at the start of an exciting movement into a more sustainable future, and we are committed to continuously evolving our features, our products and our level of transparency - to support sustainability across our ecosystem in any way possible.
Contact Accedo One team to learn more about sustainable marketplace and start your sustainability journey today.
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Case Study: How Accedo One and its partner ecosystem supports customers’ sustainability journey
