Project Albert

Industries are now under more pressure than ever to reduce their impact on the environment and the media broadcasting sector is no exception. Whilst in the public arena broadcasters and production companies are competing for business, behind the scenes they are collaborating on a unified sustainability project.

Albert is an on-line, sophisticated carbon calculator, specifically designed to measure the carbon footprint of a media production. Thanks to Albert, organisations in this sector are now better equipped to assess how much carbon they are producing and which areas to target that will reduce their overall footprint. Albert was initiated by the BBC, in partnership with the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), Outsourcery and Sharepoint City, to be used across the TV and film industry.

Albert is able to collect, share and display data from across a wide range of production houses and the industry as a whole, enabling the companies to compare and assess their productions against the industry average.

Measuring the carbon footprint of television media
Like many industries, the BBC wanted to reduce the carbon footprint of media output but had no way of measuring its progress. Consequently, it went on to develop an in-house tool to do this and approached BAFTA to help with the roll-out across the wider TV and film industry.

BAFTA’s remit is to support, promote and develop the art forms of the moving image in film, TV and games and so it was keen to lead the implementation and to contribute towards sustainable content production.

Aaron Matthews, Albert Project co-ordinator, said: "The project started at the BBC, which in addition to measuring the impact of its building portfolio, was keen to understand the carbon impact of all activities undertaken in the production process. However, it couldn’t move towards more sustainable programme-making without first understanding the current situation.”

Richard Smith, the BBC’s Project Manager for Sustainable Productions said: “There had been one-off attempts before to try and work out what the carbon footprint of a production was. The problem was that the work was always done by consultants, was expensive and the methodologies were always different. It was therefore very difficult to obtain a benchmark for what a typical hours-worth of T.V. production meant in carbon terms.”
The partnership created a platform, based in the cloud, which the media production industry could share. This data could then be collected to provide an overall measure of the media industry’s carbon output.

Creating a solution for carbon measurement
Project Albert was delivered via a cloud-based extranet system developed by Sharepoint City, and hosted on Outsourcery’s enterprise-grade, cloud platform (O-Cloud).

The project commenced with a consortium of broadcasters and independent production companies which came together with BAFTA to form the Albert Group. This included BBC, Channel 4, IMG, ITV, All3Media, Kudos, Sky, Twofour, Boundless and Endemol to gather data on carbon emissions in media, and to jointly fund the project. The group needed to find a solution which would work for all parties. They needed a tool that could get them started quickly, without the up-front capital costs and Albert delivered just that.

Each company in the consortium committed to using Albert to gather information from its own productions that built up a comprehensive cross-industry pool of data. However, this presented a challenge in terms of data security for the information collated on the Albert portal.

As BAFTA Digital Marketing Projects Manager, Genevieve Smith explained: “Security was a key concern for Project Albert because of the sensitivity of the information provided. Therefore, this tool needed to be able to handle permissions-based access levels and to give different layers of information depending on the user. Sharepoint City was able to work with BAFTA to develop a SharePoint solution that achieved this successfully”.

Miss Smith went on to say: “A cloud-based system allowed BAFTA to coordinate the project with ease. Sharepoint City and Outsourcery have been extremely supportive in responding to the help we required both at the start and with any on-going improvements and user queries.”

Pauli Visuri, Consulting Director at Sharepoint City said: “Outsourcery has the engineering knowledge to provide the secure cloud platform along with the management, understanding and service levels to actually keep it running on behalf of the client. This allowed us to focus on our area of expertise; the SharePoint application development for BAFTA. This was therefore an ideal partnership.”

Media production companies are now able to sign up and utilise the Albert portal to share information on their carbon emissions, produce an accurate measure of how much they use, compare results and set future targets for emission reductions.

How Albert was received
Albert has seen nearly 1000 users from 100 media companies register for the project so far, which gives a wide-ranging spread of data that is representative of the media industry. Most Albert users are those working in TV production, with some from the film and radio sector. These individuals are working to produce content for national news, regional magazines, sports, studios and international factual products. Categorising the footprints was useful to show which types of output produced the most carbon emissions.

Albert has received positive feedback from its users. Mark Hawkins, Twofour Group’s Managing Director, said: “Our carbon footprint is really important to us as an organisation. Now, with Albert, we have an industry wide tool, which makes it simple to monitor the carbon footprint of a production around a particular genre. This is such a powerful thing to do. Being part of Albert, as well as delivering and reducing our impact on the environment, will deliver real financial returns.”

Project Albert identified that on average 5.8 tonnes of carbon emissions are produced for every hour of television. Results show that travel and the production office made up the majority of emissions, with 38 per cent and 30 per cent respectively. The productions with the most intensive carbon emissions are those using a great deal of travel or a significant amount of power on location.

This data is crucial to determine the most carbon intensive production methods so that these can be targeted to reduce future overall emissions.
Additional benefits of Project Albert include the carbon neutral platform that the portal resides on.

Miss Smith said: “With all our partners we try to work with people who think about sustainability. Outsourcery was able to provide a solution in a carbon neutral environment and having achieved ISO accreditations for environmental management, quality and information security, we had the reassurance that Outsourcery followed strict standards to minimise environmental impact”.

The future of carbon measurement in media
The Albert Consortium, Outsourcery and Sharepoint City, demonstrated that by working together, industries can take real steps to increase environmental awareness.

Mr Matthews said: “We have the mantra that you can only manage what you measure. As Albert has been running for under two years, the first year results were the benchmark which we will be recording ourselves moving forward.”

Project Albert has successfully enabled media companies to collect and compare data on their carbon emissions and unveil the information needed to set themselves realistic targets for reducing their carbon footprint year on year.