Towards a more Sustainable Media Industry : Limecraft

Summary

The European film industry accounts for 800.000 tonnes of CO2 emitted (tCO2e), growing 30% YoY. The global industry as a whole emits several times more.
Formal reporting of Carbon emissions is now mandatory for large companies, and will become so for most SME’s in 2027. We need to act now.
The root causes of increasing carbon footprint are physical transport and massive operational inefficiencies due to architectural complexity.
Limecraft is an award-winning 100% carbon neutral service, so having Limecraft at the core of your supply chain doesn’t contribute to your carbon footprint.
As a side effect of architectural simplification, you will experience shorter turnaround times and drastically improved operational stability.

Introduction

One hour of TV or film production creates emissions equivalent to driving around the world twice in the average diesel car, according to Albert – BAFTA’s sustainability initiative. This year’s report found average emissions per hour of UK-produced content in 2023 to be 16.6 tCO2e, up 33% from 2022, with drama the highest-emitting genre at 48,7 tCO2e. Given that an estimated 1800 European producers create a total 16,000 hours of fiction per annum, according to the Audiovisual European Observatory, the European scripted entertainment sector on its own accounts for 800,000 tCO2e. That’s a lot to improve.

Looking at the operational best practices and how supply chains are organised, we often see extreme inefficiencies. We are not even talking about producing images with GenAI, which consumes an amount of energy per image that’s equivalent to a fully charged smartphone. More importantly, in the trenches of production and postproduction you will often find so called ‘best of breed’ architectures which are, in fact, built on a hodgepodge of point solutions that are competing for data, requiring excessive file transfers and transcoding operations, and are therefore very energy inefficient. Things tend to get even worse when companies choose to collaborate and engage in co-production.

When we consider the massive power consumption implications of shifts in technology, and an expected 30% increase year-on-year in technology usage (not taking GenAI into account), and we observe the huge opportunities for improving operational efficiency, it becomes clear that producers and postproduction facilities can and must choose a radically different approach. If you care about the environment and are also convinced you need to more than just ticking the boxes, read on.

At Limecraft, we take our responsibility very seriously. We are a SaaS platform used on a day-to-day basis by many tens of thousands of users, so even seemingly small improvements will have an accumulated positive impact on the industry as a whole. Every aspect of our operations is oriented around the need to improve our ecological footprint. It is chefsache. Here is what we mean by it, why you should care, and how you reap the benefits.

What is this about?

Environmental sustainability should not be reduced to mere greenwashing — a superficial attempt to appear eco-friendly without making meaningful changes. True sustainability requires genuine commitment to reducing environmental impact, enabled by structural ecological measures and the adoption of ethical practices that benefit the supply chain and eventually the entire industry. Consequently, we engage with suppliers, partners and customers to go beyond marketing buzzwords and symbolic gestures, ensuring their actions align with transparent, measurable environmental goals. This means investing in renewable energy, reducing waste, and minimising carbon footprints. Sustainability is about real change, not just optics, and should be rooted in integrity, accountability, and continuous improvement.

At Limecraft, we put our money where our mouth is. We adhere to the following leading principles to ensure that our operations and those of our customers are efficient and aligned with genuine environmental sustainability principles.

1. Transparency and Continuous Improvement

Limecraft ensures 100% transparency in data management and decision-making. See our 2023 Carbon Footprint Report and Supplier Code of Conduct for reference. We believe that openly sharing data about environmental impacts is the basis for trust and accountability.

2. Simplicity over Complexity

From a technical point of view, unlike some BigTech players, we strive for maximum simplicity. We will always propose straightforward solutions over unnecessarily complex technical processing. This reduces inefficiencies, lowers energy consumption, and aligns with the goal of minimising your environmental footprint. Furthermore, we aim for the shortest possible supply chain, ensuring fewer intermediaries, reducing the number of ‘hops’ between steps, which also reduces turn around times and improves operational stability.

3. Reduced Physical Transport

According the latests BAFTA Albert report, travel and transport are by far the largest source of CO2 emissions in television production.

In our operations, Limecraft undertakes to minimise physical transport. This applies both to data and physical goods. By preferring online meetings over physical meetings, we reduce the carbon emissions and environmental costs associated with transportation. More importantly, enabling our customers to send files digitally instead of shipping discs in multiple copies helps the industry optimise operations.

4. Cold Storage Over Spinning Discs

Limecraft promotes cold storage rather than maintain data on spinning discs. Cold storage refers to data on media not requiring continuous power, such as tapes or offline storage systems. Spinning discs, like traditional hard drives, consume several times more energy because they remain powered to allow quick data access. By using a proxy-based workflow as proposed by Limecraft, the cold storage behaves almost like online storage, so you have the combined benefits from cold storage with the accessibility you expect from an online system.

5. Minimising the Number of Transcodes and File Transfers

Limecraft is committed to minimising the number of transcodes and file transfers. Not only does each transcode and file transfer consume a lot of energy, it also increases the potential for data corruption and degradation. By reducing these processes to the absolute minimum, Limecraft reduces the computational power needed. This thoughtful approach ensures that the energy and resources used in dematerialised production operations are as efficient as possible.

6. Responsible AI

In a world increasingly reliant on AI technologies, Limecraft adheres to the principles of responsible AI. We avoid using artificial intelligence unless it’s strictly necessary, understanding that AI is resource-intensive. By re-using any pre-existing metadata sourced from pre-production and production processes wherever possible (e.g. you don’t need face recognition if you can use the casting documents), Limecraft avoids unnecessary computational demands.

In summary, Limecraft’s sustainability approach is grounded in practical, efficient, and transparent actions. We aim for operational simplicity, maximum reduction of energy-intensive processes, and we ensure that any use of technology, including AI, is thoughtful and necessary. In recognition for these efforts, we are awarded the DPP Committed to Sustainability mark.

Sustainability Lingo – about GHG, CSRD, Scope 1, 2 & 3

Carbon Accounting is a task that can present many hurdles and methodological pitfalls. The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) protocol provides the world’s most widely used greenhouse gas accounting standard for companies. It provides standards and tools that help tracking progress toward climate goals. It is used as the foundation for the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) imposed by the European Commission.

The GHG Protocol provides a comprehensive framework for measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions. It offers guidelines and standards for companies to effectively track their emissions and achieve their climate protection goals. It takes a comprehensive approach by considering both direct and indirect emissions, which are divided into three different scopes:

Scope 1 – direct emissions from owned or controlled sources, such as heating devices, airco systems, and company vehicles using petrol or diesel
Scope 2 – Indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy consumed by the reporting company, such as purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling for own used
Scope 3 – All other indirect emissions that occur in the value chain, including purchased goods and services, capital goods, waste generated in operations, business travel, employee commuting, and the use of sold products.

Why we care? Because we all have to, sooner rather than later

Adopted by the European Commission in November 2022, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) replaces and builds on the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) by introducing more detailed reporting requirements and expanding the number of companies that have to comply.

All large enterprises that do business in the EU – including those based outside of the EU – need to disclose their emissions from 2024, including scope 3 value chain emissions. The CSRD will apply to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well, and the first reports for SMEs will be due in 2027, though companies can opt out of until 2028.

💡 For your reference, please find the Carbon Footprint Report of Limecraft in FY2023.

How to Successfully Implement a Sustainability Policy

Rather than viewing carbon footprint reporting as a burden, like a document produced by consultants that costs a lot of money, we chose to place sustainability goals at the heart of our company from day one.

Environmental sustainability is considered chefsache, and is fully supported by the Board of Directors. Each employee and partner is held accountable. Moreover, we focus on the advantages rather than the cost or the time it takes to fulfil the formal requirements.

Here are the key ingredients for success:

First and foremost, it is important to opt for the simplest possible solution. Unlike some BigTech suppliers, Limecraft is not in the business of selling CPU power or volumes of storage. We earn our income by handling media on behalf of our customers. Thus we have created a common interest in reducing technical complexity. As a spillover effect, this will also reduce turnaround times and drastically improve the reliability of our services.
Secondly, we have made sure that we use energy-efficient real estate (our required heating capacity is close to zero and our offices don’t use mechanised air conditioning) and we procure electricity from guaranteed 100% renewable sources (more specifically, all electricity is produced by ecopower).

Next, we have produced a detailed calculation of our CO2 footprint according to CSRD standards. For your reference, please find the link to our FY2023 Carbon Footprint Report. In summary:
- Scope 1 exhaust adds up to 8 tCO2e, mainly due to a number of cars using petrol; these cars have now been depreciated.
- Scope 2 exhaust is close to zero because all of our electricity is sourced from Ecopower.
- Scope 3 is the biggest in size but limited to 124 tCO2e thanks our efforts in conducting meetings online rather than in-person, by avoiding airplanes for travel, and by introducing a hybrid working policy to reduce commuting.
- 2026 target: 30% reduction (despite an estimated company growth pace of 40% per year), mainly by selecting and engaging with vendors that share our environmental concerns. Hence we published a Supplier Code of Conduct that we are using to challenge existing suppliers, and that we impose when engaging with potential new suppliers.
We have gone the extra mile by offsetting the remaining 133 tCO2e via Go Forest!, thereby establishing net zero emissions for FY2023.
We make carbon neutral services available to the market and thus help our customers, and eventually the wider industry to optimise and reduce carbon footprint.

How you can Benefit from Improving your Footprint

Using Limecraft enables you to scrap the CO2 contribution for Media Asset Management and related production operations, because Limecraft is a certified net zero emitter.

More importantly, a platform like Limecraft enables you to implement remote ingest (rather than to rely on physical transport of discs), remote editing (allowing editors to work from home), or to engage in genuine real-time online collaboration.

When implemented correctly, you will experience significantly shorter turnaround times and improved reliability of the supply chain thanks to reduced transcode and file transfer operations.

Any questions at all? Feel free to contact us for more info. In case you are attending this year’s IBC, feel free to book a meeting so we can have proper conversation.

Learn from the Best

Hotel Hungaria – Onze natuur using Limecraft to manage several petabytes of original footage on cold storage
Arrow International Media using Limecraft for remote ingest from the US into UK