

Atop TV Sets, a Power Drain Runs Nonstop - quizbiz
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/26cable.html

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pcowans
For the sake of comparison, per capita energy consumption in the US (for 2003,
from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_con...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita))
is 10,381.2W, or around 91,000kWh/yr, so the example of 446kWh/yr in the
article corresponds to about 0.5% of average energy consumption.

Maryland has a population of 5,773,552, c.f. 308,745,538 for the whole US,
i.e. about 1.9% - my guess is they're actually talking about electricity
consumption here, not overall energy consumption.

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cmurphycode
I was surprised to see that our FIOS box power button does absolutely nothing.
After you turn it off, it's still recording two channels, so when you turn it
back on, you can rewind and watch the last hour of the current channel and the
last channel you were on. It also constantly shows a "Press the menu button to
turn on FIOS", so that consumers don't get confused when they power on the TV
but not the STB.

Basically, the power button is completely pointless. I might as well leave the
system fully on all of the time.

If you unplug the box, it takes about 90 seconds to bring the system back.

It doesn't seem impossible to program a state where the box is sleeping, but
ready to wake to record scheduled shows, etc. Of course, that would still take
phantom power, but at least it wouldn't be running full-blast all the time.

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drinian
I've noticed that the Roku box just doesn't have a power button (and doesn't
deal all that transparently with being shut off; there's usually a few WiFi
configuration screens where you have to hit "OK"). It doesn't draw very much
power, thankfully, having no DVR functions.

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ben1040
Why don't IPTV services like FIOS and U-Verse do the timed DVR recording on
the headend side, and stream it down the pipe when someone wants to watch it?

At that point the STB needs to only use the onboard storage as a cache for the
the trick-play features (pause/rewind a show you're watching live). And the
device can drop into a true low-power sleep when it's not being used, since it
doesn't need to keep a disk spinning 24/7 to record shows on its to-do list.

And the provider gets to market it as a DVR with nearly infinite storage
space, since it's de-duplicating all the recordings on the headend.

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drinian
Given the additional cost to the service provider, it's not that appealing to
them. However, this has been done. There was a lawsuit about it, in fact:

<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2327137,00.asp>

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pwg
Link to a non-paywall site with the article:
[http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/atop-tv-sets-a-power-
dr...](http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/atop-tv-sets-a-power-drain-that-
runs-1562466.html)

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ams6110
_One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of
446 kilowatt hours a year_

Hm so my HD DVR and cable box (if I had either, which I don't) might cost me
$50 a year to run. Sorry I don't see that as a big issue for most people who
are probably spending $1,500 a year or more on the content subscription. I
agree with the cable companies on this one, most people are not going to wait
for a full boot-up to save $10--$20 over the course of a year.

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OllieJones
We have people scrambling to reduce power density in data centers. That,
apparently, is the easy part. Our industry (online services of all kinds)
obviously needs to tackle power consumption on customer premises too.
Otherwise we risk a user revolt. This problem, unlike many environmental and
cost problems, is actually solvable.

Let's get to it!

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georgieporgie
_Low-energy European systems reboot from deep sleep in one to two minutes._

What sort of system takes that long to come out of sleep?

This sounds like more evidence that competency is not required in order to be
successful in business. :-)

Here, on Comcast, it takes so long to switch channels (sometimes multiple
seconds), that channel surfing is no longer reasonable. Additionally, the
channel listings are limited to less than half a screen so they can cram more
ads in, so locating interesting shows is an exercise in frustration. A
Netflix-style, information-dense interface is now so superior that I see
absolutely no future for cable television systems.

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cantbecool
My thoughts exactly. I could not believe the recent cable box firmware updates
Comcast rolled out. When I press the channel up or down button the remote, I
see a light blink on the box indicating it received my input, but the cable
box is so sluggish that when I press channel up a few times, it takes a few
seconds to interpret my input and change the channel. It is bizarre that they
did not do proper quality assurance testing on the set top boxes they are
disseminating out to subscribers.

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jfruh
"One British company, Pace, sells such boxes to American providers, who do not
take advantage of the reduced energy options because of worries that the
lowest energy states could disrupt service. Cable companies say customers will
not tolerate the time it takes to reboot the system once the system has been
shut down or put to sleep."

LOL AMERICA

