The protracted measures to contain the contagion lead large hi-tech companies to consider how much their products and services consume during work and remote teaching.
With an update to Teams, its remote communication and collaboration platform, Microsoft is committed to reducing the energy used by video meeting software for each individual user.
According to the first statistics provided by the group, it was enough to lower the sensitivity of light, the speed of streaming and the requests entrusted by the processor to Teams, to save 50% of energy consumed by the program, compared to what happened previously.
Before the change, a Teams meeting with a nine-participant grid required nine separate 'render' streams, which meant assigning each user a separate video stream, with obvious power consumption.
Teams now combines the various sources, video and audio, into a single broadcast stream, reducing the power requirements for each connected device.
Microsoft has also optimized the way the software manages automatic exposure and white balance, without affecting the quality of the reproduced images.
As a blog post from Microsoft's Tech Community explains, further innovations will be introduced in 2022 to improve the energy impact of the company's services for consumers.
The group's commitment to sustainability goes beyond products.
At the beginning of February, the company had launched the Impact Deal, together with the CRT Foundation and OGR Torino, the acceleration program for companies with a social and environmental impact at European level.