Atop TV Sets, a Power Drain Runs Nonstop | Hacker News Reader

Atop TV Sets, a Power Drain Runs Nonstop

nytimes.com

21 pointsquizbiz13 comments

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...) 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I've been wishing for this for a long time. Actually, it was Google Reader's behavior that made me think of it- when you subscribe to a blog via RSS, Reader will show you all of the archived entries back as far as anyone else on Google has subscribed to it. Very nice.

I can only imagine that it's a content usage restriction, but you'd think they'd be able to lawyer their way out of it. The cable companies wouldn't even have to mimic Google's behavior- start by just allowing access to things you've personally recorded.

The future, of course, is to skip all of this nonsense and just let you stream what you want, whenever you want, and pay exactly for that. Ah, well.

I think a headend PVR ends up being more expensive because everything at the headend is built to server/telco standards, not consumer standards.

Link to a non-paywall site with the article: http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/atop-tv-sets-a-power-dr...

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.

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!

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.

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.

"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

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