Technology and sustainability for Entertainment 5.0 and beyond
The entertainment industry has undergone changes along with societal evolution. Entertainment 1.0 was story telling around the fire in the hunter-gatherer age, Entertainment 2.0 was theatre and plays in the agricultural age, Entertainment 3.0 was the age of big screens and movies in the industrial age, Entertainment 4.0 was that of TV and in-home entertainment in the information age, and now Entertainment 5.0 is that of mobile screens and over-the-top (OTT) streaming entertainment in the digital world. The next age of entertainment will be ‘phygitalligent’ and bring in the best of all the ages of entertainment leveraging AI/AR/VR technology while bringing back simple physical presence in an inclusive and sustainable world.
Sustainability is not discussed enough in connection with the entertainment industry. With OTT streaming, as an example, consumers do not understand the carbon footprint associated with storing, transmitting, and connecting the data for non-linear program availability. The Royal Society in its report titled “Digital technology and the planet: Harnessing computing to achieve net zero[1]” urges regulators and platforms to stream in SD vs. UHD to help in combatting climate change. UHD streaming is 8X more carbon intensive compared to SD according to the report. The French think tank, The Shift Project[2], estimates that online video streaming emissions worldwide equals the total emission produced by a country like Spain. This is a problem which will compound exponentially with the spread of 5G, 4K and 8K content, and capable devices. Also, it is accepted that 4K content does not provide readily perceptible improvement in the video quality as experienced by the small screen users. Hence, it is appropriate for regulators to treat the OTT industry like the auto industry and impose emission norms. To ensure that the entertainment consumer gets the best possible experience, the emission norms can be based on a quality metric for the pixels delivered.
Technically it is possible to scale up consumer experiences at the edge using technology advances such as Edge AI, while transmitting SD content. As an example, 480p resolution content (SD) can be scaled up to 720p (HD) using neural network inferencing on the mobile phones. This can be done in real-time consuming very little additional power. In-fact with nominal bitrates, 480p SD content can be scaled to 1080p full HD. In addition, filters and other image processing tools can be leveraged to provide further perception-based enhancements on mobile phones. This is a use case of Edge AI where the mobile phone acts as the Edge device. In other OTT use cases, the edge devices would appropriately be routers, fire sticks, set-top boxes, and the TV hardware for larger screens.
The codecs which encode and decode the video are also constantly improving to provide better compression. Edge AI and the latest codecs can combine forces to provide the best possible experience matching the display capability on the consumer device be it mobile phones or TVs.
Let us hence herald an Entertainment 5.0+ age which has a sustainability mindset at its core.
[1] https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/digital-technology-and-the-planet/digital-technology-and-the-planet-report.pdf?la=en-GB&hash=310E9BCB116571E8681710A187E0FA52
[2] https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-02.pdf