The Corporate Star Awards: where tech and social good converge

This year, there was another Environmental, Social and Governance-led highlight in the IBC calendar with the addition of the Corporate Star Awards that aims to recognize and celebrate the fantastic ESG achievements in the Broadcast, Media and Entertainment Sector. Bitmovin was proud to win the award for Best Campaign to Improve Diversity for the progress we’ve made in making our recruitment process more inclusive, increasing representation of women and people of color at leadership levels across the company and hosting workshops that focus on helping Bitmovers become better allies to underrepresented groups. Receiving the award was a huge honor! However, we also understand that DEI is a journey, not a destination and that we must continue driving change across Bitmovin and the media and entertainment technology industry.

There are numerous studies about how more diverse teams improve a company’s bottom line, but organizations should want to be more diverse and inclusive because they care about people, not profits. Additionally, becoming more diverse and inclusive does not mean hiring a few more women and people of color and calling it a day, it means examining the company’s culture and identifying and changing behaviors and practices that could alienate underrepresented groups. All of this requires real time and resource and support from leadership teams.

The Corporate Star Awards are bringing additional, much-needed focus on ESG In the media technology industry, so I asked Lisa Collins the awards’ co-producer, to share some more background on the aim and long-term vision for the awards. Lisa said, “Our vision for the Corporate Star Awards is to unify the diverse segments of our industry. In a completely impartial setting, we aim to spotlight the often-overlooked ESG initiatives that may not glitter as brightly as product launches but are equally, if not more, important. 

The Broadcast Media industry is still in its nascent stages of aligning with the 2030 ESG goals established by the UN. To truly lead in this space, it’s essential for us to foster best practice sharing and holistic industry collaboration. The Corporate Star Awards are designed to be the catalyst for this shared ambition.”

Celebrating leaders of change

While we were over the moon to win a Corporate Star Award, we were also inspired by all the winners and finalists dedicated to leading positive change across the industry. Irdeto, a world leader in digital platform cybersecurity and a company we are a proud technical partner of, also won a Corporate Star Award for the Best initiative to strengthen global partnerships for its work to support the mass adoption of electric vehicles by helping provide a seamless and secure system for authenticating and authorizing EVs during charging.

Alongside its sustainability initiatives, Irdeto is also a champion of DEI in the media and entertainment technology industry. Lisa Spencer, VP of Marketing at Irdeto, said, “Innovation in tech is driven by new ideas, which is why it is essential tech companies need diversity of thought. But diversity in tech shouldn’t be justified simply because it supports innovation. Ultimately, it’s just the right thing to do, and Irdeto believes the media technology industry should reflect the wider world, celebrate people’s differences and tackle the challenges facing underrepresented groups.“

Exceptional support for Exceptional Minds

Another winner at the Corporate Star Awards was Exceptional Minds for Best Charity. Exceptional Minds is an academy and studio preparing young adults on the autism spectrum for careers in animation, visual effects, 3D gaming and other related fields in the entertainment industry. It provides technical and general work readiness training tailored to help students fulfil their artistic and professional potential. 

Renard Jenkins, who sits on the advisory board of Exceptional Minds, said, “Making the media and entertainment technology industry more diverse hinges upon inclusion, which in turn requires equity by ensuring people receive the right support based on their unique background. This is something we’ve strived to achieve with Exceptional Minds by giving young, neurodivergent people the opportunity to pursue their dreams in the entertainment world.”

The journey to a more diverse and sustainable industry continues.

While it is important to celebrate the achievements of the corporate and non-profit organizations working hard to bring positive ESG-led change to the media technology industry, it’s also important we don’t become complacent. 

My fellow Bitmover, Anuja Vagh, Head of Integrations, said that the biggest changes she’s seen from the industry are “recognising that DEI and sustainability are important and valid issues to be tackled.” Yet, Anuja also noted that “There is a lot more we can do in the industry. We need to think about changing the culture and attitudes that are deeply embedded in society that we often don’t recognise them for they are. At this year’s IBC, there were still many instances of casual sexism against women, which show that we as a collective, not just women, need to create an environment where it is unacceptable.”

So, ultimately, we here at Bitmovin are proud of the changes we’ve made and also our fellow Corporate Stars Award winners and finalists for making the industry more diverse, inclusive and sustainable. However, we also understand that we, as a company and an industry, we are embarking on a journey. So instead of continuously asking, “Are we there yet!?” let’s commit to evolving and learning so we can become the change the world needs.

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What were the biggest highlights for you this year?

NAB is an intense 5 days, but it’s always worth it for the satisfaction of seeing customers, partners and prospects in person. This year’s event was also super special because it was NAB’s 100th show! It made me reflect on how much the media and entertainment industry has changed and how much video has shaped the world – from the growth of broadcasting, which delivered landmark moments such as the 

first televised coronation of a monarch to the first music video to ever be aired on TV. The media and entertainment industry was further revolutionized by the growth of video streaming which paved the way for companies such as Netflix, which fast became a cultural phenomenon by pioneering the Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) business model and still remains a tastemaker for content and technology trends today. 

100 years of NAB also led me to think about Bitmovin’s own journey at the show as we prepare to celebrate our 10th anniversary as a company on 16th June. We began exhibiting at NAB around 7 years ago with a much smaller team and booth, so it’s incredible to see how far we’ve come from those days and what we’ve built together. This year’s NAB was an outstanding show for us, with a tonne of great announcements, including our CMCD partnership with Akamai, having Nomad on our booth and also taking home an NAB Best of Show Award for Smart Chunking!

AI has gained real momentum as a trend across the technology industry. What are your thoughts on that and did you see any exciting AI innovations at NAB?

A few years ago AI was a huge topic in the media and entertainment industry and the buzz for it has definitely returned because of major advancements in AI/ML with ChatGPT (which a lot of Bitmovers have had a lot of fun with, including using it to make a rap song about video codecs!) and generative AI. Although some might use it as a buzzword, it is great to see some practical applications of AI and Machine Learning in video streaming, such as  in our Video Complexity Analyzer and Super Resolution upscaling. With the ongoing interest in the industry, I am curious and excited to see what new solutions emerge, especially when it comes to improving efficiency and sustainability. 

Sustainability has also been pretty high on the news agenda, what are your thoughts on that?

It is encouraging to see the industry embracing more and more sustainability as a core value, and I think it’s great the industry’s first-ever Excellence in Sustainability Awards were presented at the show. Becoming more sustainable is something every company should be striving for, and as an industry,  we need to do better on a corporate and technical level. At Bitmovin, we are implementing new policies and guidelines to help us reduce our carbon footprint. We’ve also partnered with the University of Klagenfurt on a research project called GAIA, which has the ultimate goal of creating a climate-friendly video streaming platform that provides complete  energy awareness and accountability, including energy consumption and GHG emissions, along the entire delivery chain.

I did also hear some cool discussions related to sustainability at the show, including the prominent advantages of cloud-native solutions over the “lift-and-shift” or “rehosting” approach, which delivers promising results in terms of performance and carbon footprint reduction.

What were some of the other biggest trends you saw at NAB?

AI and sustainability dominated discussions at NAB Show, there were also other big topics that are just as important. The first is ATSC 3.0 and 5G local networks, which represent state-of-the-art and the latest evolution within traditional broadcast television and telecommunications workflows. These technologies are enabling new possibilities for efficient content distribution, interactivity, and remote production. ATSC 3.0 had a huge presence in the convention hall this year, and there were a number of demonstrations around using private 5G pop-up networks for live contribution feeds, which is something that some of our partners in the Bitmovin Innovator Network are starting to take advantage of. 

On the other hand, WebRTC is a technology that is disrupting a lot of workflows that had traditionally been in the broadcasting or telecommunications domain. It’s been around for several years now, but we’re starting to see it evolve from being an open-source, DIY-type solution into something where there are now mature products and commercial offerings using WebRTC as the underlying technology. It’s pretty incredible that any modern web browser can now power 2-way or group video communication that used to require expensive, dedicated hardware.

Now NAB is over what are your plans?

The last few weeks have been incredibly busy for the entire team as we prepared for NAB. I also ran the Paris marathon, so I am definitely going to have a short break, but not for too long! NAB is a huge event to prepare for, but there is also a lot of work that needs to be done following the show with customers, prospects and partners.

The post It’s a Wrap! NAB 2023 in Review with Stefan Lederer appeared first on Bitmovin.

Dr. Christian Timmerer is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC) at the University of Klagenfurt and one of the co-founders of Bitmovin. We asked him a few questions to learn more about the goals and motivation behind the ‘GAIA’ project. 

When you co-founded Bitmovin back in 2013, was there any focus on sustainability? What changes have you seen over the last 10+ years?

Christian: With our research background, we always tried to utilize the latest technology and research results which includes our focus on video codecs. For example, our first FFG-funded project termed “AdvUHD-DASH” aimed at integrating HEVC into our video encoding workflow; later, we were among the first to showcase AV1 live streaming (2017 NAB award); and now we’re already successfully experimenting with VVC (Collaboration with Fraunhofer HHI). 

Each new generation of video codec reduces the amount of storage by approximately 50%, which contributes to sustainability goals. Over the past 10+ years, there has been a shift to focus on more efficient usage of the available resources, where in the beginning of video streaming over the internet, much was solved using massive over-provisioning. I think this is no longer the case, and people are starting to think about environmental and climate-friendly video streaming solutions in the industry.

GAIA is a two-year joint research project between Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt. What is the end goal, and how soon do you think there will be actionable results and recommendations?

Christian: The results of the GAIA project will (i) enable complete awareness and accountability of the energy consumption and GHG emissions and (ii) provide efficient strategies from encoding and streaming to playback and analytics that will minimize average energy consumption.

In the beginning, we will mainly focus on collecting data and benchmarking systems with regard to energy consumption that will hopefully lead to publicly available datasets useful for both industry and academia at large, like a baseline for later improvements. Later we will use those findings to optimize encoding, streaming and playback concerning energy consumption by following and repeating the traditional “design – implement – analyze” work cycles to iteratively devise and improve solutions.

Will the results of this research be exclusive to Bitmovin?

Christian: We will showcase results at the usual trade shows like NAB and IBC., while scientific results and findings will be published in renowned conferences and journals. We will try to make them publicly available as much as possible to increase the impact and adoption of these technologies within the industry and academia. 

This is the fourth time Bitmovin and the University of Klagenfurt have collaborated on a research project. What makes this one unique?

Christian: Environmental-friendliness was always implicitly addressed within the scope of previous research projects; GAIA is unique as it makes this an explicit goal, allowing to address these issues as the top priority. 

You can read more details about the GAIA research project here

Ready to make your own video workflows more eco-friendly with HEVC or AV1 encoding? Sign up for a free Bitmovin trial today!

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