Video compression gains new role in AI-era infrastructure planning

Enterprise leaders are rethinking video compression as AI-generated content, immersive media and higher-resolution video push up network traffic, energy use and infrastructure costs. A BizTechReports vidcast featuring VITEC and Qualcomm executives argues that next-gen codecs like VVC could become a strategic lever for efficiency and sustainability.

Why it matters: - AI-generated content and expanding video use are increasing pressure on networks, storage and data centers. - Better compression can lower bandwidth use, reduce operating costs and ease energy demand across the video lifecycle. - The shift matters for streaming providers, telecom operators and enterprise IT teams that are now weighing total cost of ownership alongside performance.

What happened: - BizTechReports hosted an executive vidcast with Eric Deniau, senior vice president of research and development at VITEC, and Aytac Biber, director of product management at Qualcomm and a board member of the Media Coding Industry Forum. - The discussion focused on video compression as a strategic tool for managing AI growth, infrastructure costs and sustainability goals. - The executives highlighted Versatile Video Coding, or VVC, as the successor to High Efficiency Video Coding, or HEVC. - Biber said VVC can cut bitrates by up to 50% versus HEVC while preserving the same video quality.

The details: - Video now supports enterprise collaboration, healthcare, education, digital signage, surveillance and industrial operations, making demand growth hard to avoid. - Biber said video has become the dominant source of network traffic worldwide. - Deniau said the challenge is not reducing video use, but improving efficiency across production, encoding, transport, storage, decoding and playback. - AI-generated video, extended reality, immersive applications and more capable consumer devices are increasing the amount of video data organizations must process and distribute. - Biber said rapid AI infrastructure growth and data center expansion are also raising worldwide energy demand. - Improved compression reduces the amount of data transmitted, which lowers bandwidth requirements and can reduce operational expenses. - Energy savings do not map one-for-one with compression gains, but transporting fewer bits still cuts networking and processing load. - Deniau said energy consumption is becoming a more important factor in procurement and large-scale technology deployments. - Deniau also pointed to sustainability reporting requirements as another driver. - VITEC’s GreenPEG initiative looks at product design, supply chains, logistics and customer deployments, not just manufacturing. - Internal assessments cited by Deniau indicate that most of a video’s environmental footprint is created while products are encoding, transporting and displaying video.

Between the lines: - The discussion shows sustainability is moving from a corporate responsibility topic to a buying criterion. - Codec upgrades alone will not solve infrastructure strain, so organizations are looking at end-to-end optimization. - Hardware acceleration remains important because efficient silicon can reduce energy use beyond algorithmic gains. - The business case for new codecs is getting stronger as bandwidth demand, energy costs and video volumes rise together. - Measurement is becoming central, with leaders encouraged to track quality of experience, bandwidth consumption, energy use and carbon impact in the same framework.

What’s next: - Organizations evaluating future video strategies will likely need to test codec readiness, hardware availability, installed device bases and rollout timelines before migrating. - Technology leaders are expected to put more weight on long-term operating costs and energy use when planning video infrastructure. - The broader video ecosystem will need coordinated improvements in compression, hardware design and infrastructure management to sustain growth.

The bottom line: - Video growth is not slowing, but the industry’s next competitive advantage may come from making that growth far more efficient.