Benjamin Schwarz serves as President of Greening of Streaming (GoS), a member-funded industry body dedicated to reducing the energy footprint of streaming — through measurement rather than models. GoS is an independent organisation, distinct from CTO Innovation Consulting; this page describes Benjamin’s role there.
From advocacy to evidence
GoS was founded by Dom Robinson during the COVID lockdowns, pulling together engineers, broadcasters, CDN operators and technology vendors around a question nobody else was seriously asking: where does streaming’s energy actually go? Benjamin took over the presidency from Dom and led the restructuring of GoS from a UK limited company into a French non-profit association (Loi 1901) — governed by a board rather than any single person, because an organisation whose credibility rests on independence needs governance to match. GoS today counts more than twenty member organisations.
Labs, not talking shops
GoS is organised into focused labs, each designed to produce published outputs. WattLab — the measurement engine — runs REM, the Remote Energy Measurement platform: smart plugs on real devices, capturing wall-power data at one-second intervals. No models, no proxies. Its server-side sibling OWL (Online WattLab) runs standardised workloads continuously across video transcoding and AI inference. Language Lab produces research papers, most recently AI in Streaming Media Sustainability: Distinguishing Impact from Innovation. Policy & Guidelines Lab turns measurement into evidence-based input for policymakers and standards bodies, and Protocol Lab leads technical engagement with the standards community — including a workshop on measuring media energy consumption co-organised with 3GPP and 5G-MAG in March 2026.
Why measurement matters
Measuring instead of modelling keeps overturning received wisdom. In WattLab’s first end-to-end hackathon, some TVs drew significantly more power when fed HD than 4K — the opposite of what most of the industry assumes, and the kind of finding you only get by putting a smart plug on a real device. Evidence like this is what allows the industry to make energy decisions based on facts rather than assumptions.
Benjamin tells the full story of the transformation in From Talking Green to Measuring Watts, first published on SVG Europe. For membership and lab participation, visit greeningofstreaming.org.
Writing on this site — including personal essays touching on energy and sustainability — represents Benjamin’s own views, not GoS positions.