Entertainment industry slow to adopt green practices, survey says
By Wendy Wilson -- Video Business, 2/24/2009
Feb. 24 | Despite reporting an increased awareness of the importance of implementing green practices, more than 75% of respondents in a new survey of entertainment industry professionals gave the industry a failing grade for its efforts to make concrete progress toward creating more sustainable businesses.The survey of 100 IT executives working for such companies as studios, post-production houses and distributors of digital content, was conducted by the Business Performance Management Forum in conjunction with Rackable Systems and Intel. Part of their joint "Think Eco-Logical" initiative, the survey provided the entertainment industry with an opportunity to rate its own performance in greening its business, while offering insight as to where the industry can benefit from improved education about new resources and best practices going forward.
"Basically, what we found is that there is a high sensitivity to the need to reduce a company's carbon footprint and to have more green IT practices," said Derek Kober, director of the BPM Forum. "The industry understands the benefits involved, but by in large has not made much progress in that area."
Jason Coari, senior marketing manager for Rackable, a provider of server and data center storage products, said the research indicated a lack of understanding on the part of companies that believe they need to improve their energy efficiency but cannot tie the "real business benefits" of doing so back into their operations.
"The demand on computing power and equipment is not abating, and it's not going to abate anytime soon," Coari said. "As a vendor, we need to provide these companies with better tools to show them how their current equipment compares to what's available today."
Coari cited the improved energy efficiency of current servers over those purchased four or five years ago, along with solid state hard drives and advances in technology that allow data centers to operate at 80 degrees rather than 65 degrees, as just a few real-world ways content providers could boost their eco-friendliness.
"There's no silver bullet that's going to solve the problem, but the more we try to share best practices, the more we're able to help everyone move in the right direction," Coari said.
Respondents from the entertainment industry also ranked celebrity involvement second only to recent press about environmental concerns as the top two reasons for their companies' greater collective interest in green issues.
"There were not as many celebrities' names in the e-commerce study," BPM Forum's Kober said of the difference between this survey and a similar one of e-tail executives last month.
