The threat of climate change requires a drastic reduction of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in several societal spheres. Thus, this also applies to reducing and rethinking energy consumption of digital technologies. Video streaming technology is responsible for more than half of digital technology’s global impact [ref]. There is rapid growth, also now with digital and remote work has become more mainstream, in the amount of video data volume, processing of video content, and streaming which affects the rise of energy consumption and its associated GHG emissions.

The processes from video encoding, transmission, decoding, and displaying on the end user’s screen require a non-negligible amount of electricity – it starts with computational resources for video frame processing (encoding, compression), transmission, and decoding (decompression, error correction, and compensation, etc.) and consumption (video effects, etc.). There is also significant growth in video resolutions and hence higher bitrates, and the fact that this content is ubiquitously accessible anytime and everywhere with mobile devices and through high internet speed (e.g., 5G). These factors altogether inevitably cause a higher consumption of computation, distribution, and transmission resources. Therefore, there is a need to explore methods to make video encoding, transmission, and decoding greener without compromising quality. Tackling the challenge of reducing resource consumption end-to-end also brings direct opportunities to reduce the overall energy consumption in the whole video processing chain. Such challenges are: Developing video compression methods to minimize the decoding energy on user devices, designing energy management strategies to improve energy performance on cloud servers, developing algorithms helping to improve video encoding and decoding energy efficiency optimizing their usage of the underlying platform, e.g., CPUs, select the most energy-efficient network channel for video streaming, approaches to lower data volumes produced by video content, Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques leveraging to calculate expected encoding energy consumption.

The International Workshop on Green Multimedia Systems 2023 aims to bring together experts and researchers to present and discuss recent developments and challenges for energy reduction in multimedia systems. This workshop focuses on innovations, concepts, and energy-efficient solutions from video generation to processing, delivery, and further usage. Please see the https://athena.itec.aau.at/events/events-gmsys23/