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What IBC taught us about the next sustainability conversation
We went to IBC 2026 ready to talk about sustainability. We came back talking about visibility.
That might sound like a small distinction. After four days of demonstrating GreenDot™, questioning live data and talking to people from across the media technology industry, it feels like an important one.
On the stand, the way into that data was DEO, GreenDot's Digital Energy Officer. DEO is an optional AI layer you can talk to in plain language: ask what's drawing power, get an answer pulled from live telemetry. Visitors did exactly that. And once they could see what was happening inside the infrastructure, the conversation changed. It stopped being only about carbon reporting. It became: what can the data tell me?
Showing the part of the workflow you don't normally see
For anyone who couldn't make it to Amsterdam, the idea behind our demonstration was deliberately practical.
Media workflows depend on moving data. Footage is ingested, files travel between sites, and content moves through production and distribution systems every day. That movement needs energy. But while teams know how much data they're moving and how quickly it gets there, the energy behind those workflows is much harder to see.
At IBC we paired GreenDot with IBM Aspera to make that hidden layer visible. Aspera handled the high-speed, secure movement of large files. GreenDot monitored the infrastructure involved, measuring energy activity at source and using that measured data to calculate the associated carbon impact. For the demo we set up two Aspera servers - one on AWS in Oregon and one on Scaleway in North Holland - and ran transfers between them. The same dataset under different network conditions produced different energy profiles for the same data movement.
The two locations made a further point. The same energy doesn't carry the same carbon everywhere: Oregon and North Holland run on different energy mixes, so identical activity carries a different carbon cost depending on where it happens. GreenDot calculates the carbon from measured energy using each location's emissions factor, and DEO can surface the difference on request. It's the principle we discussed at the MTSS (now Media Climate Accord) Summit panel earlier this year: same equipment, different realities.
The point wasn't to create a new metric for its own sake. It was to expose something already happening. Speed tells you how quickly a file arrived. Energy data tells you something about what it took to get there.
GreenDot monitoring GreenDot
We applied the same principle to our own stand.
GreenDot was collecting live telemetry from the equipment on Stand 14.A57, measuring the energy each device was drawing and calculating the carbon from it. Anyone on the stand could interrogate that data through DEO. Dot Group CTO Nigel Freddy did the same from Ireland, querying the Amsterdam equipment remotely.
That measurement is the core of what GreenDot does, and it worked exactly as intended across the show.
As if that wasn't enough, we then put DEO to work on the specifics. How quickly one question led to more useful ones was the real surprise. What is drawing the most power? When does consumption peak? What changed? Is one device behaving differently from the others? Where would we look first if we wanted to use less?
That is the difference between having a sustainability figure and having operational visibility.
From "what is GreenDot?" to "what else can I see?"
The conversations on the stand followed a similar pattern, and many of them ran through DEO. People wanted to know whether GreenDot could see an individual piece of equipment. Then a site. Then multiple sites. Then infrastructure operating across different countries. Could you distinguish between types of equipment? Could you drill down from the broad picture to one machine? Could the same approach work in a data centre, a facility or a distributed operation?
That breadth is the whole design. GreenDot casts the net wide by intent: it's built to see across as much of your infrastructure as possible from day one, whatever kind of equipment that is, and the range it supports keeps growing. The starting point isn't one fixed part of the operation with the rest bolted on later. It's the full picture first, then the freedom to drill down to whatever deserves attention.
That matters because organisations don't all need to optimise the same thing. In a media environment the point of interest might be an encoder, a storage system, a remote production workflow or a transfer between locations. Somewhere else it could be a server estate, a bank of digital screens, a manufacturing process or equipment spread across hundreds of sites. See all of it first, and you can put your attention where it pays off most.
IBC Bites had already hinted at the gap
Ahead of IBC, GreenDot was a Knowledge Partner for Neha Modi's IBC Bites series, which used polls and questions to get the media technology community talking. One result stayed with us. In a LinkedIn community poll, 56% said their energy and carbon numbers were still modelled or estimated.
It wasn't a scientific survey of the industry. But it opened exactly the conversation we wanted to have in Amsterdam.
Estimates have a role, particularly where measured data isn't available. But if you want to understand what is actually happening inside an operation, and where an intervention might make a difference, better underlying data changes what becomes possible.
Measurement and the Media Climate Accord
That made our involvement with the Media Climate Accord especially relevant. GreenDot was one of the stops on the Sustainable Media Technology Tour at IBC, where Lee Otterway and Fraser Jardine demonstrated GreenDot and DEO and discussed the practicalities of understanding the energy and carbon behind media infrastructure.
As part of the Tour, the Accord asked each participant the same question: how is sustainability influencing your product roadmap, and how does your technology help customers improve environmental performance while also delivering business value, operational resilience and broader ESG outcomes?
Our answer was that sustainability doesn't influence the GreenDot roadmap. Sustainability is the reason GreenDot exists. What makes it interesting is that solving the sustainability problem also exposes opportunities around cost, efficiency and operational resilience. The same measurement that tells you your carbon impact tells you where energy, and money, is being spent.
The Media Climate Accord asks the industry to do three deceptively simple things: measure impact, report progress and communicate action. All three need evidence underneath them. Targets matter. Reporting matters. But the operational question comes first: what is actually happening?
That is one of the most encouraging aspects of the Accord. It brings the sustainability conversation closer to the technology, workflows and operational decisions where change actually happens.
Making the idea visible
Even the stand became part of the story. GreenDot's living foliage, lower-energy LED lighting, DEO display and live demonstrations helped Stand 14.A57 become a finalist in the IBC Best Stand Design Awards.
That was a lovely piece of recognition. More importantly, the stand did what we hoped: it made people stop and ask questions. A sustainability proposition can easily become abstract. A screen showing live data from the equipment around you is much harder to treat that way.
Sustainability isn't always the first question
IBC also reinforced something we shouldn't ignore. Not everybody starts with sustainability. For many organisations, operational efficiency and cost are more immediate concerns.
That's not a problem for the sustainability case. Energy sits underneath both. If equipment is consuming energy unnecessarily, there is an environmental consequence and a financial one. Better visibility helps an organisation identify both.
GreenDot isn't about turning every technology decision into a carbon exercise. It's about making another layer of operational information available, so teams can make better-informed decisions. Sometimes the reason to act will be carbon. Sometimes cost. Sometimes performance, utilisation or simply understanding why something changed will come first. The same underlying data can start all of those conversations.
Built in media. Not confined to it.
IBC gave us an especially demanding environment in which to demonstrate the idea. Media technology is distributed, data-intensive and constantly changing. Infrastructure can span offices, facilities, data centres, remote productions and equipment operating in different parts of the world.
But the questions weren't media-specific. They were the questions any team asks about its own infrastructure:
What is using energy?
Where?
When?
What changed?
What should we investigate?
Those questions apply anywhere technology infrastructure consumes power.
That may be the biggest lesson we brought home from Amsterdam. The next sustainability conversation isn't only about producing another sustainability figure. It's about having enough visibility to understand what sits underneath it, and enough useful data to decide what to do next.
Measure. Understand. Optimise. Repeat.
Curious what GreenDot would show you?