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Efficiency loves company – why resilient streaming workflows must be both sustainable and smart
In streaming, efficiency is multidimensional: speed, sustainability, security, cost, and reliability must align. With decades of experience, G&L Systemhaus shows it’s no longer about the ‘best’ path, but about the best combinations that deliver efficiency in watts, time, and trust.
For decades, the streaming industry has equated efficiency with speed: higher throughput, lower latency, faster scaling. Yet it is now widely recognized that true progress also means sustainability: delivering more performance with fewer watts. With energy costs increasing and regulations tightening not only on carbon emissions but also on data sovereignty and security, the industry is challenged to deliver live and on-demand video that reduces environmental impact while maintaining resilience and reliability. For us at G&L, this has become a guiding principle: sustainable performance is not an afterthought, but a core design goal.
From research to real-world: energy savings through hardware acceleration
Earlier this year, G&L engineers shared results with the "Greening of Streaming" community from controlled tests on our Audio Video Processing Unit (AVPU). The findings were striking: the AVPU, equipped with NETINT VPU hardware-accelerated encoding workflows, achieved two to three times higher energy efficiency compared to CPU-only encoding, with no significant trade-offs in video quality.
A typical 20-second clip that would cost the energy of a cup of coffee when encoded on CPUs consumed only 2–5 Wh on VPUs – often just a quarter of the CPU’s draw. And importantly, hardware acceleration consistently delivered real-time performance; something CPUs struggled with on demanding codecs such as AV1.
The lesson was clear: efficiency and sustainability go hand in hand when workloads are properly matched to the right hardware. But efficiency is not just about silicon; it’s about systems.
Enter the G&L Playout Hub: built on sustainable foundations
This insight directly shaped the development of G&L's Playout Hub, which made its debut at IBC 2025. Designed for broadcasters, OTT services, and event producers, the Playout Hub takes the proven hardware efficiency of the AVPU and wraps it in a complete, resilient, and operator-friendly platform.
The platform was built to answer three pressing demands of today’s media workflows:
- Always-on reliability with HA/DR – triple-layer redundancy from ingest to encode to egress.
- Sustainability by design – hardware-accelerated encoding for optimal energy efficiency, while scaling workloads intelligently across infrastructure.
- EU data sovereignty – running entirely in EU data centres, compliant with GDPR and ISO 27001. Sovereignty here does not mean isolation: in G&L’s layered model, control elements can remain in secure EU environments, while elastic capacity can be drawn from trusted partners like the Akamai Connected Cloud. This ensures flexibility without creating dependencies.
Efficiency in practice: automation and rapid deployment
A critical dimension of efficiency is not just energy, but also time and operational overhead. Here, the Playout Hub introduces:
- Minutes-to-live deployment through multi-tenant architecture: isolated customer spaces spun up instantly with presets, endpoints, and secure RBAC.
- Event-driven automation for scheduled live streams, seamlessly blending real-time sources with pre-produced trailers, graphics, or overlays.
- API-integration that connects directly into existing toolchains without lock-in.
For event producers managing high-visibility productions, this means less time spent on infrastructure and more time focusing on the content.
Conclusion: efficiency loves company
The journey from AVPU test results to the launch of the G&L Playout Hub underlines a simple truth: in streaming, efficiency is multidimensional. It’s about speed, sustainability, security, cost and reliability – all working together.
As the industry continues to debate insourcing vs. outsourcing, or cloud vs. on-prem, the question is no longer which path is "best", but which combinations deliver the greatest efficiency in watts, in time, and in trust.
G&L's Playout Hub stands as a concrete example of how sustainable design and resilient engineering can come together in one platform, offering media providers not just a greener workflow, but also a smarter, more reliable one.