“In the middle of the night, when most Americans are sound asleep, their lights and appliances off, a power hog is wide awake and running at nearly full throttle: the boxes that operate their cable or satellite television service,” Ralph Vartabedian reports for The Los Angeles Times. “The seemingly innocuous appliances — all 224 million of them across the nation — together consume as much electricity as produced by four giant nuclear reactors, running around the clock. They have become the biggest single energy user in many homes, apart from air conditioning.”
“A set-top cable box with a digital recorder can consume as much as 35 watts of power, costing about $8 a month for a typical Southern California consumer,” Vartabedian reports. “The devices use nearly as much power turned off as they do when they are turned on.”
“‘It is a classic case of market failure,’ said Andrew McAllister, a member of the California Energy Commission. ‘The consumers have zero information and zero control over the devices they get,'” Vartabedian reports. “The industry agreed recently to voluntarily reduce the power consumption of new devices, which it said would save consumers $1 billion annually. But experts say the deal will provide only a fraction of the potential gains and take years to realize.”
“The set-top box issue is part of a much larger group of personal electronic devices in homes that represent one of the fastest-growing parts of residential electricity use,” Vartabedian reports. “Americans are spending more than $12 billion a year on electricity to run computers, smartphones, game consoles, modems and other devices in their homes — one price of the nation’s connected culture, according to estimates by the Consumer Federation of America.”
“The set-top boxes consume power when turned off because of spinning hard drives, program guide updates and software downloads, leaving consumers with one choice to reduce that load: Unplug the device. The downside is that turning the system back on requires a convoluted reboot,” Vartabedian reports. “Energy experts say the boxes could be just as efficient as smartphones, laptop computers or other electronic devices that use a fraction of the power thanks to microprocessors and other technology that conserves electricity. Ideally, they say, these boxes could be put into a deep sleep mode when turned off, cutting consumption to a few watts. At that rate, a box could cost less than $1 a month for power, depending on how much it is used.”
Apple TV outperforms the stringent requirements of the ENERGY STAR Program Requirements for Set-top Boxes Version 3.0. A set-top cable box with a digital recorder can consume as much as 35 watts of power. The following table details power consumption in different use modes:
Source: Apple Inc.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David G.” for the heads up.]
It’s a little more than that. The issue here is that cable companies don’t have to provide information on how much energy is being consumed by their boxes, thus consumers aren’t going to know how much the true cost of cable is going to be. $18 is probably a huge shock for most consumers to end up paying on top of their cable bill, and it’s hidden away without a line item in their electric bill.
Cable companies have no incentive to deliver lower consumption devices, unless consumers become aware of how much power they consume.
However, there’s a lot cable companies could do to make their devices more efficient. For example, during the times that the devices aren’t actively recording or playing back, there’s no reason why the device can’t go into a sleep mode. If a box is only active/used 4 hours a day, that would mean 20 hours a day it could go into low-power mode.
Likewise, all of this is something that should be considered when looking at the Apple TV and evaluating overall costs.
Cable companies don’t build boxes.
That would be Motorola and others.
The specs may be agreed upon and then different companies build them, but it is no different than TiVo and other equipment.
Most of the newer stuff I have seen puts off less heat, so I am thinking they use less power. As far as idle, people would then bitch about the wake up time because hey, it’s cable and they bitch about anything.
directv and the cable companies won’t spend anymore than they have to. If they had large SSD’s instead of old legacy hard drives, that would take care of much of it, also have smart power management would help, think they will? Your dreaming then.
Power savings going from HDD to SSD would be minimal. When I had an HD DVR a couple years ago, *standby* power was 22W. When it was on (manually, or whenever it spun up the HDD to download software or schedule updates), it increased to 27W.
Meaning that even if left on standby an entire year and excluding the occasional HDD spin up, it would consume 192.72 kWh. That’s almost $24 a year (US average of $0.1226/kWh residential), not counting taxes or other fees tacked on to that.
Not a lot on an individual basis, but about half of the US’s 115 million households have at least one DVR, so almost $2.8 billion is going to US power utilities each year just for keeping DVRs on standby. Might be a bit less since it’s not clear whether the sources I checked consider DVRs to only include cable/sat boxes, or include AppleTV and similar devices, but the amount is still staggering.
Most of us pay about 12¢ per kilowatt-hour. At 35 watts that’s about 0.840 kilowatt-hours, or 10¢ per day. That’s $3 per month, not $8, and 35 watts is not the second biggest energy user in a home. Your refrigerator/freezer generally is the second biggest load. Depending on how you light your home, heat water, and cook, your set-top box may be way down the list of energy using devices in your home. This article is very misleading.
If you really want to save money on electricity, begin by throwing away all your incandescent bulbs right now, today. Use either CFL bulbs or LED bulbs in every fixture and lamp in your home. The money you save will pay for replacement bulbs in a short time. Lighting can be up to about 40% of your electric bill, and these alternative bulbs typically use about 1/8th the power. If your electricity bill is $100 per month, changing out your light sources can save you about $35 per month.
Except for the CFL bulbs, I agree with everything you wrote.
CFL bulbs have such a high failure rate, they never pay for themselves. Furthermore, they contain hazardous mercury which makes them a disposal problem when they do fail.
You can buy about 10 CFL bulbs a month with the money you save. As far as mercury goes, do you use fluorescent tubes? Same issue. How do you dispose of them? How much mercury does not go up a smokestack from a coal fired plant when you use CFLs? HINT: Coal contains mercury, which gets vaporized into the air when coal is burned.
Market Failure – those who claim markets can sort everything out – that only works when there is true competition and big firms will not make a deal behind closed doors.
We have seen that does not happen and even beloved Apple made a mistake when it came to the hiring deals.
The point I like to make is that we do need an origination that can create the minimum accepted for products and services such as Cable companies, insurance companies, pharmas, cars, etc…
At the same time, government agencies must ensure they raise the bar instead of adding stifling rules.
My parents are TV addicts, with my mom having the TV on for up to 14 hours a day sometimes. Combined with the 55″ LCD panel above the cable box, I’m sure a large portion of her hydro (electricity) bill is due to that. Yet the addiction is too powerful, so the costs are swallowed.
Interestingly, what the article doesn’t cover is energy usage outside your home. They say that, for every smart phone in use, there is the equivalent of a refrigerator (in terms of power) supplying it with network content. Consider that fact when you think about the 1.5 billion smart phones in the world.
Apple TV could BE the replacement for those energy-sucking cable set top boxes. Instead of working uphill against existing content providers (the cable companies), Apple should instead partner with them, to make a version of the energy-efficient Apple TV the default “cable box.”
> if only Apple TV had the content!
Cable customers will then have ALL of their existing cable content (plus the existing Apple-supplied content), served up through an elegant Apple-designed interface. One that does not drive the customer crazy through bad design. And one that saves money on their utility bill.
If you think about it, this is equivalent to the iPhone strategy. Apple did NOT create its own wireless service and release iPhone to use it. Instead, Apple partnered with existing wireless carriers (usually one per market). Initially, iPhone mostly “delivered” the existing “content.” It was successful because of Apple’s elegant multi-touch user interface, to give customers what they already had on their clumsy PDA-class smartphones. Other Apple-supplied services, such as the App Store, iCloud, and Siri, came later AFTER Apple gained a foothold, to further distinguish iPhone as the “copycats” soon appeared.
Following the iPhone strategy allows one more key ingredient. SUBSIDY (from the cable company). The “basic” Apple TV cable box can be “free” with contract. But the customer can ALSO opt for the complete Apple TV (the much-rumored “iTV”). With an iPhone-like subsidy from the cable company, Apple can make the up front cost to the customer match or even beat the price tag of “dumb” TVs with equivalent screen specs, while maintaining a healthy profit margin. The cable company can collect the subsidy back through monthly fees, including that fee for “renting” the current cable box.
Apple can continue to offer the $99 Apple TV (as well as an unsubsidized complete TV), for “cable cutters” and customers of other content providers. But with all of those countless Apple TV cable boxes out there, Apple will be in a better position to negotiate its own content deals.
Problem is the amount of time that it takes to retrieve all of the program guide info after restarting the box. It’s not feasible to unplug the box, otherwise I would do this more regularly — both to save energy and possible wear on the hard drive. With Directv, the HD DVR/receiver takes about 20 minutes to cycle through the start sequence and load up the program information if you unplug the receiver.
It takes this long because the program guide streams from the satellite signal, and the guide information also maps the signals from multiple satellites to the corresponding channel on the receiver. It shouldn’t be this difficult to design a more viable sleep mode.
Sadly, I am not surprised. The cable box technology is crude at best. The software behind them is abysmal. I’ve always suspected the Motorola and Scientific Atlanta (now THERE’S an oxymoron) boxes were horrendously inefficient – they run hot enough to fry eggs.
But cable companies being cable companies, they DO NOT CARE. When you have a monopoly, there’s little incentive to improve. The boxes are old technology and cheap junk. If the companies had to compete for business, perhaps this would change.
I can only hope that Apple can knock some sense into these knuckleheads. We pay enough as it is for cable; I’d rather not have to have a ridiculous electric bill because the cable companies can’t be bothered to advance from the Early Pleistocene Era to the 21st century. Is that asking too much? Or are we unworthy of looking in the general direction of our cable company’s headquarters?
interesting article.
And the problem with current DVR boxes is that if you turn the power supply off, you don’t get your shows recorded. Unbelievable.
It’s a little more than that. The issue here is that cable companies don’t have to provide information on how much energy is being consumed by their boxes, thus consumers aren’t going to know how much the true cost of cable is going to be. $18 is probably a huge shock for most consumers to end up paying on top of their cable bill, and it’s hidden away without a line item in their electric bill.
Cable companies have no incentive to deliver lower consumption devices, unless consumers become aware of how much power they consume.
However, there’s a lot cable companies could do to make their devices more efficient. For example, during the times that the devices aren’t actively recording or playing back, there’s no reason why the device can’t go into a sleep mode. If a box is only active/used 4 hours a day, that would mean 20 hours a day it could go into low-power mode.
Likewise, all of this is something that should be considered when looking at the Apple TV and evaluating overall costs.
Cable companies don’t build boxes.
That would be Motorola and others.
The specs may be agreed upon and then different companies build them, but it is no different than TiVo and other equipment.
Most of the newer stuff I have seen puts off less heat, so I am thinking they use less power. As far as idle, people would then bitch about the wake up time because hey, it’s cable and they bitch about anything.
directv and the cable companies won’t spend anymore than they have to. If they had large SSD’s instead of old legacy hard drives, that would take care of much of it, also have smart power management would help, think they will? Your dreaming then.
Power savings going from HDD to SSD would be minimal. When I had an HD DVR a couple years ago, *standby* power was 22W. When it was on (manually, or whenever it spun up the HDD to download software or schedule updates), it increased to 27W.
Meaning that even if left on standby an entire year and excluding the occasional HDD spin up, it would consume 192.72 kWh. That’s almost $24 a year (US average of $0.1226/kWh residential), not counting taxes or other fees tacked on to that.
Not a lot on an individual basis, but about half of the US’s 115 million households have at least one DVR, so almost $2.8 billion is going to US power utilities each year just for keeping DVRs on standby. Might be a bit less since it’s not clear whether the sources I checked consider DVRs to only include cable/sat boxes, or include AppleTV and similar devices, but the amount is still staggering.
Then you would gripe about the higher priced boxes.
Reliability is the main goal, not convenience or power savings.
Most of us pay about 12¢ per kilowatt-hour. At 35 watts that’s about 0.840 kilowatt-hours, or 10¢ per day. That’s $3 per month, not $8, and 35 watts is not the second biggest energy user in a home. Your refrigerator/freezer generally is the second biggest load. Depending on how you light your home, heat water, and cook, your set-top box may be way down the list of energy using devices in your home. This article is very misleading.
If you really want to save money on electricity, begin by throwing away all your incandescent bulbs right now, today. Use either CFL bulbs or LED bulbs in every fixture and lamp in your home. The money you save will pay for replacement bulbs in a short time. Lighting can be up to about 40% of your electric bill, and these alternative bulbs typically use about 1/8th the power. If your electricity bill is $100 per month, changing out your light sources can save you about $35 per month.
Keep the freezer/fridge packed, too. Chilled/frozen products take a lot longer to warm up compared to empty air.
Except for the CFL bulbs, I agree with everything you wrote.
CFL bulbs have such a high failure rate, they never pay for themselves. Furthermore, they contain hazardous mercury which makes them a disposal problem when they do fail.
You can buy about 10 CFL bulbs a month with the money you save. As far as mercury goes, do you use fluorescent tubes? Same issue. How do you dispose of them? How much mercury does not go up a smokestack from a coal fired plant when you use CFLs? HINT: Coal contains mercury, which gets vaporized into the air when coal is burned.
Market Failure – those who claim markets can sort everything out – that only works when there is true competition and big firms will not make a deal behind closed doors.
We have seen that does not happen and even beloved Apple made a mistake when it came to the hiring deals.
The point I like to make is that we do need an origination that can create the minimum accepted for products and services such as Cable companies, insurance companies, pharmas, cars, etc…
At the same time, government agencies must ensure they raise the bar instead of adding stifling rules.
Is it really that hard to make those gizmos go into a “sleep” mode at night?
My parents are TV addicts, with my mom having the TV on for up to 14 hours a day sometimes. Combined with the 55″ LCD panel above the cable box, I’m sure a large portion of her hydro (electricity) bill is due to that. Yet the addiction is too powerful, so the costs are swallowed.
Interestingly, what the article doesn’t cover is energy usage outside your home. They say that, for every smart phone in use, there is the equivalent of a refrigerator (in terms of power) supplying it with network content. Consider that fact when you think about the 1.5 billion smart phones in the world.
Apple TV could BE the replacement for those energy-sucking cable set top boxes. Instead of working uphill against existing content providers (the cable companies), Apple should instead partner with them, to make a version of the energy-efficient Apple TV the default “cable box.”
> if only Apple TV had the content!
Cable customers will then have ALL of their existing cable content (plus the existing Apple-supplied content), served up through an elegant Apple-designed interface. One that does not drive the customer crazy through bad design. And one that saves money on their utility bill.
If you think about it, this is equivalent to the iPhone strategy. Apple did NOT create its own wireless service and release iPhone to use it. Instead, Apple partnered with existing wireless carriers (usually one per market). Initially, iPhone mostly “delivered” the existing “content.” It was successful because of Apple’s elegant multi-touch user interface, to give customers what they already had on their clumsy PDA-class smartphones. Other Apple-supplied services, such as the App Store, iCloud, and Siri, came later AFTER Apple gained a foothold, to further distinguish iPhone as the “copycats” soon appeared.
Following the iPhone strategy allows one more key ingredient. SUBSIDY (from the cable company). The “basic” Apple TV cable box can be “free” with contract. But the customer can ALSO opt for the complete Apple TV (the much-rumored “iTV”). With an iPhone-like subsidy from the cable company, Apple can make the up front cost to the customer match or even beat the price tag of “dumb” TVs with equivalent screen specs, while maintaining a healthy profit margin. The cable company can collect the subsidy back through monthly fees, including that fee for “renting” the current cable box.
Apple can continue to offer the $99 Apple TV (as well as an unsubsidized complete TV), for “cable cutters” and customers of other content providers. But with all of those countless Apple TV cable boxes out there, Apple will be in a better position to negotiate its own content deals.
Problem is the amount of time that it takes to retrieve all of the program guide info after restarting the box. It’s not feasible to unplug the box, otherwise I would do this more regularly — both to save energy and possible wear on the hard drive. With Directv, the HD DVR/receiver takes about 20 minutes to cycle through the start sequence and load up the program information if you unplug the receiver.
It takes this long because the program guide streams from the satellite signal, and the guide information also maps the signals from multiple satellites to the corresponding channel on the receiver. It shouldn’t be this difficult to design a more viable sleep mode.
Sadly, I am not surprised. The cable box technology is crude at best. The software behind them is abysmal. I’ve always suspected the Motorola and Scientific Atlanta (now THERE’S an oxymoron) boxes were horrendously inefficient – they run hot enough to fry eggs.
But cable companies being cable companies, they DO NOT CARE. When you have a monopoly, there’s little incentive to improve. The boxes are old technology and cheap junk. If the companies had to compete for business, perhaps this would change.
I can only hope that Apple can knock some sense into these knuckleheads. We pay enough as it is for cable; I’d rather not have to have a ridiculous electric bill because the cable companies can’t be bothered to advance from the Early Pleistocene Era to the 21st century. Is that asking too much? Or are we unworthy of looking in the general direction of our cable company’s headquarters?
I know, right?
Like, look at this…man
http://moto.arrisi.com/products/product.asp?id=36
What outdated crap they push!!!