Go Green with EnVI: the Energy-Video Index

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.