iSIZE has won the 2021 Digital TV Europe (DTVE) VideoTech Innovation Award for Sustainability with its BitSave pre-processor for video.With global internet traffic set to reach 4.8 zetabytes a year in 2022, and 80% of this resulting from video, there is a significant environmental cost.
Today the internet is using an estimated 10% of the world’s total energy consumption, putting its carbon footprint at the same level as air travel. Anything that can reduce the traffic on the internet means a reduction in that environmental impact.
The challenge is working with an infrastructure for distributing online and mobile video that is already well established and largely unchangeable. Upgrading codecs takes time and deployment risks are high. Enter BitSave.iSIZE’s BitSave preprocesses the input video prior to encoding and removes imperceptible information that is costly to encode by all existing video encoders.
By being encoder agnostic, BitSave brings benefits to all video coding standards, like AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266 or VP9 and AV1. No changes are required in the encoding, stream packaging, streaming and decoding.Using iSIZE’s deep neural network solution, developed specifically for media content, means valuable bandwidth reduction without compromising the quality.
To create BitSave, the iSIZE team undertook extensive scientific research on visual perception and visual quality scoring to deliver a video preprocessing solution that preserves all visually salient characteristics of each input frame, while attenuating details that are imperceptible by viewers and incur significant cost when encoding with standard encoders.Sergio Grce, CEO at iSIZE commented: “We are delighted to have been recognised for our contribution to making video streaming more sustainable.
“Instead of the traditional approach of using simple signal-to-noise analysis or broad-brush bitrate reduction, we have deployed our rich artificial intelligence and machine learning to process individual video streams dynamically.
“While it is a highly sophisticated solution, BitSave runs on standard workstation hardware, making it simple and easy to implement. The consumer benefits from a more reliable service even in marginal conditions, because of the reduced bandwidth.”