Case Study: How One of Europe’s Leading Telecom Companies Embraced Sustainability

The telecom industry is at the forefront of modern technology, but with this comes high energy consumption and significant environmental impacts. Addressing these challenges, one of Europe’s largest telecom companies recognised the need to focus on sustainability within their media and entertainment workflows. Their goal? To better understand the environmental impact of these operations while balancing sustainability with financial considerations.

Humans Not Robots (HNR) partnered with this company to lead an innovative, multi-phased pilot focused on measurement, AI-driven optimisation, and transformation.  

The Challenge

This telco faced a significant roadblock in aligning their sustainability efforts with financial considerations. While they were committed to being more “green-aware,” sustainability metrics weren’t well-integrated into their media entertainment operations. Their on-premises data centre, a major consumer of power, stood out as an area that could benefit from optimisation.  

The critical challenges included a lack of tools to effectively measure power consumption across operations, and difficulties in correlating energy use with specific outputs, such as encoding TV channels. Additionally, there was insufficient data to justify appliance life-cycle replacements or investments in sustainability initiatives.

Solving these issues was crucial not only to reduce the carbon footprint of their TV operations, but also to optimise operational costs and strengthen their position as an innovative industry leader.  

The company approached HNR to implement our AI-powered observability platform, HNR to ZERO, with the following objectives:  

• Establish a framework to collect and baseline power consumption metrics for encoding pipelines, including regular monitoring of components.  

• Provide baseline power measurements with detailed reporting capabilities (e.g., per data centre, stream type, TV service, subscriber, or component).  

• Extend baseline data to include CO2e and financial costs, enabling trend analysis and comparison with alternative scenarios (e.g. hardware upgrades, stream types, on-premises vs cloud).  

• Support vendor decisions using predictive data models and cost analysis to optimise performance and efficiency.

The Solution

HNR proposed a comprehensive strategy to address these challenges, focusing on a multi-phased approach designed to measure, analyse, and reduce energy consumption.  

Phase 1 – Measuring Power Consumption in Encoding Pipelines  

The first step was to create a framework to measure power consumption within the data centre and align it with operational outputs. This included reporting consumption per TV stream, per subscriber, and per channel. HNR Discover enabled the telecom company to visualise the relationship between energy usage and business value—for instance, power consumption per viewer—using advanced AI-powered analytics. This enables the company to gain visibility into the environmental impact of its operations.  

Phase 2 – Expanding Measurement to CDN Operations  

Building on phase 1's encoding data insights, HNR extended measurements to the company’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) origin servers. This included breaking down energy consumption by channel and even by number of viewers. Automated ingestion of data points ensures the company can analyse trends much more systematically. This expansion broadens the scope of their measurement, enabling a deeper understanding of the direct impact content delivery has on their customers.

Phase 3 – Home Device Data Integration  

Finally, HNR will introduce sampling and extrapolation capabilities to anonymously and respectfully measure power consumption in home devices, such as set-top boxes. By integrating anonymised data, HNR will ensure privacy compliance, while delivering representative metrics that broaden the scope of analysis. This addition will address the "last-mile" gap in operational measurement, providing clear, end-to-end data on distribution costs, and enabling more precise, data-driven decision-making.

Throughout every stage of the pilot, HNR Deliver’s causal ML analysis identifies opportunities for optimisation, from network-level adjustments to appliance-level improvements. This also allows them to track the impact of operational and technological changes in real time, providing granular insights into how these adjustments affect their business—whether the outcomes are negative or, ideally, positive.

Results

The initiative is delivering measurable benefits across multiple dimensions:

1. Improved Visibility of Sustainability Metrics  

• For the first time, the company could track power consumption per service, channel, and subscriber.  

• Regular reporting is allowing them to analyse sustainability trends over time.  

2. Actionable Optimisation Strategies  

• HNR Deliver is helping identify hotspots within the data centre that can be optimised for reduced power consumption and carbon emissions.  

• The network PVR layer alone shows significant opportunities for energy efficiency.  

3. GDPR-Compliant Consumer Insights  

• Integration of anonymised entertainment device data maintains consumer privacy, while providing enough insights for extrapolated analytics.  

4. Future: Carbon and Financial Cost Alignment  

• By leveraging data collected through HNR to ZERO, the company can establish a baseline that offers a balanced perspective on operational green costs versus financial expenses, providing valuable justification for sustainability investments.  

• AI-driven scenario modelling will highlight potential savings, such as replacing outdated appliances or optimising streams (e.g., transitioning from SD to HD).

Encouraged by the outcomes, the telecom company is considering expanding the framework further, including:  

• Extending the methodology to other areas of their operations, such as packaging processes.  

• Leveraging collected data trends for informed vendor selection and long-term investment planning.  

• Exploring cloud deployment scenarios for potentially greater efficiencies.

Key Takeaways

This PoC is proving that sustainability metrics, when properly measured and analysed, can create significant business value. By aligning energy consumption metrics with their operational outputs and combining them with predictive models, one of Europes leading telco organisations is taking meaningful and pragmatic steps towards greener, cost-efficient media operations.  

The project also highlights how AI-driven causal analysis can bring sustainability to the forefront of high-tech industries.  

Interested in transforming your business operations to balance sustainability with optimised costs? Contact HNR today and learn how our innovative solutions can accelerate your path toward a greener future.

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