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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.
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.
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:
A critical dimension of efficiency is not just energy, but also time and operational overhead. Here, the Playout Hub introduces:
For event producers managing high-visibility productions, this means less time spent on infrastructure and more time focusing on the content.
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.