Making the world a better place through engineering is a key foundation of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)). Now through the IET Media Technical Network, it is a founding member of Ecoflow X, which is launching today. It joins the other founders Accedo.tv, Humans Not Robots, ITV, and its foundational contributors including Digital TV Group (DTG), European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Channel 4, Quortex, and Fairmile West Consulting, and observing partners including DIMPACT, UKTV and Bouygues Telecom (links to LinkedIn Company Pages).
Born out of the IBC Accelerator projects, and continuing to be supported as a Partner, Ecoflow X is an industry group focused on being an experimentation arm for sustainability. IBC (www.ibc.org) is a key Media Business and Technology exhibition and conference with over 45,000 attendees and 1300 exhibitors that takes place each September in Amsterdam. It is owned by six organisations, of which the IET is one. The other owners are the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Societry of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), SCTE - the Society for Broadband Engineers, the Royal Television Society (RTS), and the International Association of Media and Technology (IAMT)
In addition to announcing its launch, Ecoflow X are also releasing its Media Sustainability in 2026 report compiled from a Chatham House Rule Workshop held at the IET Savoy Place at the end of January 29, 2026. The workshop gathered a cross-disciplinary group of engineers, product owners, and sustainability specialists from broadcasters, infrastructure platforms, technology suppliers, and industry groups. The primary goal was to assess the current state of sustainability within the streaming sector and leverage these insights to define the strategic trajectory for the next phase of the Ecoflow initiative, known as Ecoflow X. While sustainability has become highly institutionalized and visible over the last two years, the report highlights an execution gap; environmental goals are frequently deprioritized in favor of immediate business pressures like cost reduction, platform growth, and rapid AI adoption.
The report reveals a strong industry consensus that the greatest leverage for systemic environmental impact sits in the middle of the supply chain—specifically within distribution networks, cloud platforms, and CDNs. However, optimization at this level is severely bottlenecked by commercial confidentiality, data fragmentation, and misaligned incentives. For example, digital twin modeling demonstrated that real-world internet infrastructure requires an immense "energy floor" just to remain online, meaning that single-stream data reductions are negligible compared to the massive savings achievable by dynamically de-provisioning or powering down idle hardware during traffic troughs. Moving forward, the Ecoflow X project will target these operational roadblocks by developing proofs of concept focused on eliminating "zombie hours" of low-value energy consumption, evolving predictive digital twins with real-time measurements, and establishing an open observability framework to standardize data-sharing signals across the media ecosystem.
You can download the full copy of the report and find out more about Ecoflow X on the IBC website at https://www.ibc.org/people-purpose/news/ecoflow-x-joins-partner-programme-for-ibc2026/22794. You will need to login to read the full article and download (free registration).
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