Go Green with EnVI: the Energy-Video Index

Abstract

Video is the most prevalent traffic type on the Internet today. Significant research has been done on measuring user's Quality of Experience (QoE) through different metrics. We take the position that energy use must be incorporated into quality metrics for digital video. We present our novel, energy-aware QoE metric for video, the Energy-Video Index (EnVI). We present our EnVI measurements from the playback of a diverse set of online videos. We observe that 4K-UHD (2160p) video can use ~30% more energy on a client device compared to HD (720p), and up to ~600% more network bandwidth than FHD (1080p), without significant improvement in objective QoE measurements.