HNR to ZERO — the 5G-EMERGE MetricsHub
Humans Not Robots
Category Streaming
HNR to ZERO is Humans Not Robots' analytics and observability layer, powering the 5G-EMERGE MetricsHub. It enables a live, satellite-and-5G content delivery network to demonstrate its own sustainability, not just its performance.
5G-EMERGE (www.5g-emerge.com) is a pan-European, European Space Agency ARTES-co-funded project led by the European Broadcasting Union, combining satellite multicast with terrestrial 5G edge delivery to solve a problem every OTT and broadcast network now faces: unicast streaming cost, and carbon, scale linearly with audience size. Humans Not Robots (HNR) is part of the 33-partner consortium, which has built and validated a satellite-enhanced CDN across four use cases in live testbeds, running CDN Origin, CDN Hops and CDN PoPs across SATCOM, near-edge and far-edge nodes, on open 3GPP and DVB standards rather than proprietary lock-in.
HNR designed and delivered the platform's MetricsHub: an observability layer pulling telemetry from every node in that CDN, using OpenTelemetry and standard tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, InfluxDB) to measure real energy consumption, carbon footprint and operational cost end to end, not modelled estimates.
On top of it, HNR coined and leads Quality of Impact (QoI): a metric that sits alongside the industry's existing Quality of Service and Quality of Experience measures, so a streaming architecture is judged on cost and carbon as rigorously as it already is on latency and quality.
This matters at scale: the TV and video streaming industry accounts for 4% of global emissions, double aviation's 2%. Yet it has had no equivalent of QoS/QoE for its environmental cost, until now. With 5G-EMERGE's architecture reaching close to 100% of population and territory while cutting redundant unicast transport, and the MetricsHub making that reduction independently auditable rather than assumed, this is a CDN that can finally show its work.
A platform that enables cheaper, faster, cleaner video streaming: that's what we've built.
