Net-zero by 2030? How broadcast and media tech can work towards a carbon-neutral & sustainable future

By Shaun Lim

The broadcast and media tech industry has made real strides in becoming greener, from sustainable production sets to renewable-powered studios. While these efforts should be applauded, the journey to truly sustainable broadcasting does not stop here.

As digital workflows, streaming, and new technologies continue to expand, the opportunity now is to extend that same momentum across the entire value chain. By rethinking how content is processed, delivered, and supported, the industry not only can reduce its footprint, but also set a powerful example of innovation meeting responsibility.

Yet despite progress, sustainability remains under-addressed in several parts of the media tech value chain, said Barbara Lange, Principal & CEO of Kibo121, a boutique consultancy which works with the media industry to help educate and enhance sustainability initiatives.

While she sees “significant process” in production towards delivering greener outcomes by using sustainable sets, low-emission transport, renewable-powered sources, and better waste management, other areas still lag behind and demand greater attention.

She told APB+, “Once content moves into the ‘digital factory’ phase, that is encompassing post production, archiving, mastering, and so on, sustainability efforts often lose momentum. Embedded carbon from hardware manufacturing, the lack of lifecycle assessments (LCAs) in procurement, and inconsistent reporting across facilities remain major gaps. 

“Distribution is receiving more attention, but we still lack comprehensive, real-world data on the true energy use and emissions of content delivery and streaming platforms. Without standardised measurement, it’s difficult to prioritise efficiency improvements or hold stakeholders accountable.”

According to Lange, environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) factors are also beginning to influence tangible business decisions. Vendors are being asked to provide sustainability credentials in requests for proposals (RFPs), sometimes as weighted criteria alongside price and performance.

Broadcasters, meanwhile, are increasingly selecting partners whose roadmaps include energy-efficient processes and products, cloud services using renewable energy, and low-carbon logistics. 

Technology innovation in AI and circularity further help to shift buyers to more sustainable options. These developments, however, remain incremental. 

“For the industry to have a more substantive impact in reduced emissions and energy consumption, more stakeholders need to be involved, across the entire value chain. Until that happens, the advances will remain small,” Lange said.

This is where industry groups can play a leading role to set consistent sustainability baselines that ensure efforts are comparable and unbiased. “They can facilitate consensus on measurement methodologies, emissions boundaries, and reporting formats,” she explained. “By coordinating pilot projects, publishing best-practice guidelines, and convening cross-sector working groups, they can help vendors and broadcasters adopt solutions faster.”

“Standards organisations like SMPTE, ATSC, and ITU could embed sustainability requirements into technical specifications, while alliances like Green of Streaming tackle specific pain points such as energy use in streaming.”

Furthermore, training and certification programmes ensure sustainability considerations are embedded within the entire ecosystem, from engineering and production to procurement and distribution.

Collectively, these initiatives are propelling the drive to build a truly sustainable broadcast ecosystem, one which Lange described as operating with minimal environmental impact across every stage of the value chain, from production through the ‘digital factory’ phase to final audience delivery.

She continued, “In such a scenario, hardware is modular, repairable, and designed for circular use. Content delivery is optimised for efficiency, with intelligent compression and distribution minimising unnecessary data transfer. Supply chains are transparent, with every vendor reporting emissions against agreed standards.”

To that end, the Media Climate Accord (MCA) is playing a pivotal role in providing a unified, cross-industry framework for setting non-zero targets, aligning measurement methodologies, and driving coordinated actions across broadcasters, streamers, and technology vendors.

A new initiative from the Media Tech Sustainability Series (MTSS) – which Lange is a Co-Founder and producer – the MCA brings together a global media ecosystem that unites broadcasters, streamers, content creators, technology vendors, and distribution platforms around a shared commitment to achieve net-zero emissions as an industry.

It provides a framework whereby signatories commit to measure and report their results with a focused target on reducing carbon impacts across the entire media value chain, from production and post to delivery and consumption. 

By aligning on consistent methodologies, energy and emissions targets, and fostering collaborative innovation, the MCA enables participants to make credible, comparable progress towards a common goal. 

In addition to guiding operational change, the MCA promotes best-practice sharing, supports supplier engagement, and encourages sustainable design in both content workflows and technology development. It is a pledged commitment that ensures the media sector plays a measurable, transparent role in addressing the climate crisis.

Encouraging all stakeholders to join the movement, Lange highlighted how business models would reward low-carbon choices and reinvest savings into further innovation. Audience engagement would include transparency about the environmental footprint of content production and consumption, fostering shared knowledge.

“While elements of this vision exist today, adoption is uneven. With strong participation in frameworks such as the MCA, I am optimistic that we could realistically achieve a sustainable model by 2040,” she predicted.

Embracing sustainability as smart business

For vendors, sustainability is not just about doing the right thing; arguably, it is about smart business. Lower carbon operations reduce costs, strengthen competitiveness in tenders, and align with customers who increasingly demand greener solutions.

For Appear, its commitment to sustainability was recognised with the NAB Show Excellence in Sustainability Award for Product or Service in 2023. The award recognised Appear’s X Platform’s high-capacity, versatile, and ultra-low latency capabilities for media networking, which reduces rack space, cooling, and overall energy consumption compared to other solutions.

Since this proud achievement, Appear has continued the tradition of embedding sustainability in their engineering from the outset. 

Matthew Williams-Neale, VP of Marketing, Appear, shared with APB+, “All our products are designed and assembled in Norway using renewable hydroelectric power, and we meet EU standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001, REACH, and WEEE. 

“We focus on maximising channel density per watt, minimising material use, and designing modular, software-defined hardware that can be repurposed for different events, reducing the need for additional equipment and extending product life.”

According to Williams-Neale, independent customer testing has shown that Appear platforms consume far less energy, space, and packaging than server-based alternatives, producing up to 38 times less carbon dioxide. This commitment to compact, high-efficiency design, he added, allows Appear to deliver more with less.

ESG considerations also continue to shape Appear’s go-to-market strategy and in one instance, influenced a customer’s procurement decision.

“Sustainability criteria now feature heavily in RFPs, with broadcasters and telcos evaluating lifecycle carbon dioxide impact, recyclability, and long-term energy consumption alongside performance,” Williams-Neale said.

In a specific case, he shared how a major European telco’s independent study found Appear’s platform outperforming a leading competitor on carbon dioxide emissions, energy use, space efficiency, and packaging waste. This factor, inadvertently, led to the European telco choosing Appear, and keenly demonstrates how ESG performance can be a tangible commercial differentiator.

Not that Appear is resting on its laurels. The company continues to partner with customers to design workflows that reduce infrastructure, travel, and energy use, and which emphasises efficiency.

Broadcasters and telcos, Williams-Neale said, are looking for solutions that combine performance with a smaller footprint: more channels per rack unit, lower watts per channel, and reduced lifecycle emissions. “This trend towards ‘doing more with less’ aligns perfectly with our elegant engineering and the architecture of our platforms,” he added.

As to how ESG will shape competitive advantage in the broadcast tech industry in the future, Williams-Neale identified major broadcasters such as Sky and the BBC, who continue to integrate sustainability into their operational and procurement strategies, not just as a values-based priority, but as a commercial and regulatory imperative.

He added, “Sky’s early move toward net-zero by 2030 helped catalyse industry-wide attention to carbon-neutral production, while the BBC is actively investing in lower-emission workflows and tools.”

Through energy efficiency, cloud migration, and remote workflows, technology’s role in enabling sustainable production is under closer scrutiny than ever. In response, broadcasters are increasingly embedding climate criteria in tenders and partnership decisions, favouring suppliers who can support measurable decarbonisation, said Williams-Neale.

“In this environment, sustainability is no longer a differentiator; it’s a threshold for credibility and continued relevance,” he emphasised.