Understanding EcoVadis and Sustainability in Streaming
Rakuten TV recently achieved a Bronze rating in its first assessment by EcoVadis, alongside completing its first decarbonisation plan. While this marks an important milestone, it also reflects a broader shift across the streaming industry.
As sustainability becomes more measurable, frameworks like EcoVadis are playing a growing role in how companies are evaluated. Here’s what that means, and why it may become increasingly relevant for content owners, advertisers, and partners across the ecosystem.
What is EcoVadis?
EcoVadis provides sustainability ratings for companies across four key areas: environment, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. Its methodology assesses both internal practices and how companies manage their wider value chain.
Companies receive a scorecard and are benchmarked against peers globally. These results are increasingly used within procurement processes, giving partners greater visibility into how businesses operate beyond commercial performance.
How the assessment works
The EcoVadis assessment evaluates:
• Documented policies and commitments
• Operational practices and implementation
• Measurable outcomes and reporting
Results are benchmarked across a global dataset, with medal thresholds based on percentile performance. A Bronze rating, for example, places a company within the top 35% of assessed organisations .
For Rakuten TV, this first assessment highlighted strong performance in ethics, particularly in areas such as governance, data privacy, and compliance, which remain central to how the platform operates.
Why this matters for streaming and CTV
“Our carbon footprint calculation revealed that the vast majority of our emissions derive from our value chain. This highlights the urgent need for collaboration across the entire industry. Working collectively with other industry players can help establish and enforce sustainability standards across key suppliers – such as platform partners, cloud service providers, electronics manufacturers, and production companies – ensuring that environmental requirements are consistently applied throughout the value chain.”
Filippo Mengo, PR and ESG at Rakuten TV
As a result, measuring and managing sustainability becomes a shared responsibility acrossmultiple partners. This is where standardised frameworks like EcoVadis play a critical role. They provide a common language for evaluating performance and identifying areas for improvement.
At the same time, sustainability is becoming more relevant commercially. Advertisers, agencies and content owners are placing increasing emphasis on working with partners that can demonstrate transparency and progress in this area.
Decarbonisation in practice
Understanding emissions across Scope 1, 2, and 3 is a critical first step, often revealing that the majority of impact sits outside direct operations, particularly across infrastructure, distribution, and technology partners.
For Rakuten TV, this insight informed the development of its first decarbonisation plan. Rather than being a standalone exercise, this type of roadmap defines where emissions occur and outlines how they can be reduced over time.
An ongoing focus for the industry
Sustainability in streaming is not a fixed benchmark, but an evolving area shaped by technology, regulation, and industry collaboration, where frameworks like EcoVadis provide structure, but real impact depends on how these insights are applied over time.
For Rakuten TV, this first assessment and decarbonisation plan represent a starting point. The next phase will depend on continuous improvement and closer collaboration across the ecosystem to ensure that sustainability standards are not only defined, but consistently
implemented.