SS5: Towards the Design and Evaluation of Sustainable Multimedia Experiences  

Motivation and objectives

In the past decade, the global use of any kind of online video service has increased dramatically. Due to the availability of cheap consumer devices, ubiquitous Internet connectivity, and a plethora of different video applications such as streaming, videoconferencing, or social media, billions of people worldwide make use of online video technology every day. Consequently, the share of video data in the Internet has risen to more than two-thirds of all transmitted data. Unfortunately, at the same time, the energy consumption related to online video applications also increased dramatically resulting in an estimated share of 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Next to the energy consumed by the servers and networks that transmit and store video data, the devices that viewers use to access these services also consume energy. Moreover, with the advent of more advanced audiovisual technology such as virtual reality, augmented reality, or metaverse applications, further, even more complex algorithms will be applied in the future. 

As the demand for multimedia applications continues to grow, research on energy-efficient implementations is vital for the future of our planet. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that users would like to be provided with a high Quality-of-Experience (QoE) of such services. To this end, this special session proposes to present research targeting both a high QoE and a low energy consumption of online multimedia services. Research that contributes towards the design and evaluation of more sustainable multimedia experiences in a broader sense, or that challenges the existing paradigms is hence welcomed. 

This Special Session will focus on research and technology enabling both a high quality and a low energy consumption. We will invite experts from areas such as quality assessment, sustainable HCI, energy-efficient software and hardware implementations, power and energy modeling of video systems, and crowd-sourcing based quality and energy modeling. In particular, we will encourage experts from these diverse areas to team up in collaborative studies. 

Topics of interest

Authors will be invited to contribute in fields such as (and not limited to): 

• Sustainable QoE for end users: Delivering and providing videos or video representations leading to minimum energy requirements for end-user devices. 

• User awareness on the environmental cost of high QoE: Understanding user awareness and “willingness to sacrife”: which trade-offs are users willing to make? Which measures and test designs can help to unravel them? 

• Sustainable user behavior and QoE: What are the implications of stimulating more environmental-friendly multimedia viewing/consumption practices for QoE? 

• Energy efficient streaming services: Optimized bitrate ladders for low- energy encoding of video representation. 

• Crowd-sourcing based quality and energy assessment: Techniques for leveraging large numbers of users to measure the quality and energy consumption of online video services. 

• Power and energy modeling of multimedia systems: Techniques for modeling and predicting the energy consumption of multimedia systems, including both hardware and software components. 

• Energy-QoE trade-offs for immersive media: Investigation and comparison of use cases in terms of energy consumption and provided QoE, and of measures reflecting the trade-off; energy efficiency optimization along the immersive media production and rendering chain.

• Sustainable online video systems: Holistic analysis, modeling, and optimization of online video services including provider, transmission, and end-user side energy consumption. 

Organizers

• Christian Herglotz, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany 

• Markus Fiedler, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden

• Alexander Raake, TU Ilmenau, Germany

• Katrien De Moor, NTNU, Norway