Energy and Compression Efficiency in Large-Scale Video Streaming
IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2026)
[PDF]
Mohammad Ghasempour (AAU, Austria), Hadi Amirpour (AAU, Austria), and Christian Timmerer (AAU, Austria)
Abstract: The rise in large-scale video streaming has led to increased energy demands across the encoding, transmission, and decoding pipeline. While energy consumption in video streaming has been widely studied, encoding decisions are typically made without explicitly accounting for expected content demand. As a result, the impact of view count on energy consumption and compression efficiency remains largely unexplored. This limits the ability to make informed and efficient encoding decisions in real-world streaming scenarios. In this paper, we propose EcoEncode, an analytical framework to evaluate the impact of view count on codec-level encoding decisions and the resulting trade-offs between energy consumption and compression efficiency. We further show that these decisions depend on video content characteristics and encoding configurations. Based on our findings, we provide practical insights to guide the selection of codecs and presets. Experimental results show that view count is a key factor in codec-level decisions. For low-popularity videos, EcoEncode achieves up to 99% energy savings with only 1-4 VMAF points of quality loss. Across all scenarios, the selected configurations lie on or near the Pareto frontier, and EcoEncode improves quality by up to 14 VMAF points over the least energy-consuming configuration.
