Energy Efficiency Efforts Spreading Among MVPDs, TV Stations and CE

Executives said MVPDs are moving from set-tops to Internet Protocol streaming to networked TV sets and other CE devices, reducing household energy use through increasing what’s stored in data centers and other company facilities. So operators try to use less energy in data centers, as TV stations cut electricity use, executives said.

Undergirding the trend is cost savings, according to all executives from the broadcasting, consumer electronics and multichannel video programming distributor industries who responded to our informal survey of a few dozen companies and associations. “It’s what I call the duh factor, ‘duh, you've gotta be doing this'” to be good corporate citizens, said Vice President James Ocon of Gray Television of reduced power consumption. “There is a definite benefit on the operational costs.” Company leaders need to show employees why it makes business sense and serve as champions of efficiency within their organizations to sustain the efforts, Ocon and others said. “The key managers need to be advocates for this,” said Ocon. “It starts at the top.” Panelists from the broadcasting, CE and cable industries at a Brookings Institution discussion and others on what some call green energy made similar points (CED May 31 p4).

MVPDs are eager to do away with set-tops entirely, executives said, to reduce costs in deploying them and give subscribers ways to watch programming on TVs without boxes and on connected devices like iPads that get cable channels through apps. “All these things could get the set-top box out of the house, off cable operators’ books and improve energy efficiency,” said NCTA General Counsel Neal Goldberg. “No. 1, we'd like to get rid of set-top boxes, but No. 2, if you're going to have them, it’s good to reduce energy consumption” to lower wear and tear on devices, he said.

Storing DVR programming in the cloud as Cablevision does eliminates the need for set-top hard drives, while home networking gateways centralize electronics in one device and free up second, third and fourth TV sets from a box, executives said. All channels a Cablevision customer buys are available on devices in the household besides a box, a spokesman said. Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt sees an eventual future when set-tops aren’t needed at all (CED May 22 p3). The company’s app delivers more than 200 channels to CE devices in a subscriber’s home, a spokesman said. “That’s reducing the dependency on the set-top box."

"We've sort of gotten the low-hanging fruit, which is making the boxes more efficient,” and now DirecTV is turning to whole-home networking, engineering director Stephen Dulac said. “The low-hanging fruit now is these multiroom architecture” set-ups in DBS households, he said. Customer “demand is high for it,” he said. “We see our big energy efficiency gains in the home as playing out over the next five years in that architecture.” The Digital Living Network Alliance’s RVU standard is used by DirecTV to send programming directly to smart TVs made by Samsung. “It allows you to eliminate that set-top box in that extra room,” Dulac said. “We think that’s the greatest energy efficiency play, because then you are down to that one whole-home DVR.”

Some regulators have taken notice of industry efforts. The Department of Energy this month gave MVPDs, CE companies and groups seeking more efficiency at least three more months to come to an agreement on set-top efficiency standards before the agency proposes rules (CED July 6 p2). DOE’s aware of those industries’ efforts to reduce set-top power use, though it isn’t seeing the results in significantly decreased energy usage yet in most of the devices, DOE officials said. “Ideally if you eliminate set-tops altogether, then they are not using any energy,” said Product Manager Jeremy Dommu of the department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Appliance Standards Program. John Cymbalsky, a codes and standards supervisor in that program, said DOE in general “certainly embraces any efforts that these organizations make to reduce their energy use."

Consumers must benefit from the changes for them to take hold within organizations, executives agreed. Having set-top boxes that break less, because reduced power use means they run cooler and last longer, is a benefit. “Energy consumption generates heat, heat is the enemy of these electronics, and these electronics don’t go inside the most friendly of environments” when stacked atop other CE gear in cabinets, CableLabs Chief Technology Officer Ralph Brown said: “That heat contributes to the failure of the box,” so the operator needs to dispatch a technician to a subscriber’s home. The overarching issue is “how do we increase the energy efficiency of the industry overall, not just in the home, but also in the infrastructure,” Brown said. “This hasn’t just been `we're the cable industry and we'll figure out our own problems.’ We're looking to other industries and experts for guidance."

Companies must see internal benefits, too, executives said. For cable headends and ISP data centers, servers powering at least partly down when not fully needed makes for cooler rooms that require less cooling with equipment less susceptible to breakdowns, said the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers and others. “There are both economic and business advantages” to “solutions by design” for cable operator facilities, SCTE CEO Mark Dzuban said: “This isn’t just throwing money” at projects, and involves finding “what is the low-hanging fruit today” and responding.

TV stations too are trying to use less power to lower electric bills, among their biggest expenses, and are switching from physical to digital storage, broadcast executives said. Doing away with racks of equipment saves space, trimming the size of studios and control rooms, they said. More stations may use light-emitting diodes to illuminate towers and studios, with the LEDs’ higher costs offset by lower energy use, said Ocon of Gray, with 36 TV stations in mostly mid-sized and smaller markets.

Deep-Sleep Set-Tops

Not leaving video subscribers waiting for boxes to start up or missing data updates from satellites or cable headends means energy efficiency has limits, since they can’t be completely dormant, executives said. They said light-sleep boxes that partially power down use about 25 percent of the power of regular boxes, and getting bigger savings isn’t possible until more advanced chips that allow for deep sleep are developed. Such chips would be capable of being partially powered down, something existing box semiconductors can’t do, the executives said. Deep sleep’s not possible on the current generation of boxes, said Brown. “This is really the case of teaching an old dog new tricks."

Deep-sleep requires new silicon for chips to have power scaling, where blocks of the system on the chip can be independently powered so only what’s being used to run a box is getting power and not the entire chip, Brown said. The deep sleep specs will be ready by this December, and in December 2014 the six biggest U.S. operators will have field trials, he said. Work on the deep-sleep spec encompasses silicon vendors, box makers, headend equipment manufacturers and operators, Brown said. For legacy products, “there is not much we can do on them, given the silicon, given the architecture,” said Vice President Vivek Khemka of Dish Network.

DBS set-tops may never be capable of deep sleep, always needing to be on to continuously monitor the satellite dish, executives said. EchoStar, Dish’s sister company that develops all of the DBS company’s set-tops and sells them to others, is working with chip supplier Broadcom for a deeper sleep mode, Khemka said. “Our goal is definitely to be super energy efficient, it’s just a question of getting a time line” for such efforts to be finished, he said. “I have not seen any solutions that are in the market today that are getting us to where we want to be."

Letting all types of MVPDs reduce the power used by set-tops is the move toward home gateways and other networked hubs of video and broadband, allowing a box with multiple tuners to serve several TVs, executives said. Going by different names depending on the pay-TV provider, the products centralize functionality in one big device and allow scaled-back boxes to be used with other sets, or in some cases no other boxes at all. Dish has “basically centralized all of the DVR functionality, all of the power-hungry functionality onto one box, the Hopper” with a DVR and video decoders and main processor, Khemka said. Broadcast-TV networks and Dish are engaged in litigation over the Hopper DVR’s ad-skipping function.

For DirecTV, “deep sleep is really a possibility with the thin client,” said Dulac. “That’s where we can allow the box to go into a very, very quiet state -- and you can probably get away with a longer delay in turning it back on for customers.” For devices with a DVR and server, however, “deep sleep is really difficult for DirecTV, because we are a one-way broadcast system” with boxes that are “continuously” getting information from the satellite dish and must always be connected, he said.

‘Threat of Regulation'

Industry efforts come amid potential regulation by DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency, which has the next version of Energy Star set-top efficiency guidelines taking effect in July 2013, industry officials say. MVPD and CE executives said they hope EPA adopts less-stringent version 4.0 guidelines, so a wider array of products can fall under them. NCTA hopes version 4.0 is “more flexible, and looser,” than what the agency sought, said Goldberg. “All segments of the industry have expressed concerns about the strictness of the 4.0 standard.” Energy Star over its 20 years has been a “voluntary, market-oriented approach to energy efficiency for consumer electronics,” CEA Vice President Doug Johnson said. Such a tack is “the most reasonable and cost-effective way to support and advance energy efficiency in our industry,” he said. “Inflexible, static energy use limits mandated by government are not.” The EPA had no comment.

It’s a “challenge” for a regulator to figure out how to give an MVPD “credit” for meeting Energy Star standards which can cover equipment used across a company when the firms are deploying remote-storage DVRs, apps that stream content without boxes and other non-set-top products, CableLabs’ Brown said. “You've constructed a model that says you only look at it this way, so that remote storage DVR, you don’t count that in any way, you don’t get any credit,” he continued. “We have a tremendous example of that, the unintended consequences of regulation, with the CableCARD.” The FCC and industry have said the security cards in boxes didn’t spur a market for retail devices.

AT&T, Dish and DirecTV have many version 3.0 certified boxes, they said. Many cable set-tops meet version 3.0 guidelines, while others “come close,” said Brown. “We're not being guided or directed by Energy Star” in the cable industry tech consortium’s work on developing a deep-sleep spec, he said. CableLabs is working to be “as energy efficient as possible, without disrupting the user experience,” Brown said. “Waking these boxes up is a really complicated problem.” Light sleep technology has been demonstrated and the six biggest cable operators are deploying it now in the current generation of the products and ought to have 10 million of them in customer households this year, he said. Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable will by December 2013 have 90 percent of set-tops they deploy version 3.0-certified, Brown said.

"Due to the threat of regulation and the industry’s renewed interest in energy efficiency, various efforts are under way to improve the efficiency” of set-tops, said Senior Scientist Noah Horowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council, part of the multi-stakeholder talks that prompted DOE to pause its rulemaking. Existing devices’ $3 billion worth of annual energy use could be cut by two-thirds, eliminating the need for six large power plants, by entering a deep sleep mode when they're not being used, he said. “Existing boxes continue to consume near full levels of power even though the user ’turned off’ the box and is not watching or recording a show."

DOE will continue “to work behind the scenes” on set-top energy efficiency while pausing the rulemaking until at least Oct. 1 as industry and energy conservation advocate stakeholders talk (http://xrl.us/bnfa5v), Cymbalsky said. The agency will develop a procedure to test the products’ energy efficiency, which would be used to measure any voluntary standard, he said. DOE hopes any deal includes DVRs, though networking equipment wasn’t as much a focus of the proceeding, he said. The department won’t issue a rulemaking notice if it decides to support a voluntary deal, and “if we don’t like what they sent us, then we would go down the path of proposed rulemaking,” Cymbalsky said. “What the department gains from this non-regulatory agreement is really time more than anything. Even if we promulgated a standard today, there would be a five-year lag time for compliance, so we'd be looking at 2018 almost.” What industry and advocates discussed in a May DOE meeting of starting deep-sleep trials in December 2014 “shaves quite a bit of years off of anything that our regulations could actually force to happen,” he said.

To the Cloud

Storing more programming and data remotely means household CE devices can run on less power, but that data centers and other MVPD and ISP facilities use more, executives said. All executives who mentioned what they described as a kind of Catch-22 said it poses a challenge for how companies can save energy overall when moving more functions away from households. Trying to run data centers more efficiently and ensuring they operate on backup power when commercial power goes down is one way to address this, executives said.

"Things are becoming more efficient, but there also are a lot more” networked products, Cymbalsky said. “So you basically have the two things canceling each other out.” Eliminating set-tops “may be increasing energy consumption somewhere else,” as with remote storage, Goldberg said: “The whole network is going to be consuming much more energy down the road” in the cloud. Households will use less power, “to say nothing of being able to watch video on a variety of devices,” he said.

"You could argue both sides of the coin” because moving away from set-tops increases power use elsewhere, on PCs, videogame consoles and other devices that can directly watch MVPD video, Dulac said. There are “probably a lot of tradeoffs involved,” he said. Dish by virtue of having one uplink facility to serve the U.S., with one backup, saves power by not needing the multiple headends that cable operators need in each region they serve, Khemka said. “There’s a lot of environmental and energy efficiency just by virtue of being a satellite provider."

SCTE is serving as a testbed of sorts for operators to more efficiently run headends and data centers, the organization’s employees said. It’s working on standards for how to measure such efficiency by combining the space used by equipment with its technical capacity such as processing power, Dzuban and Senior Director Derek DiGiacomo said. Operators want to meet broadband subscribers’ growing usage while limiting burdens on backend equipment and keeping electric bills in check, SCTE officials said. “The industry wants to make sure that the operators in particular have enough space and power” to grow, DiGiacomo said. “The industry also recognize the business case for energy efficiency, and oftentimes the efficient energy management is the right business decision to make."

SCTE is testing at its Exton, Pa., office ways to power a cable operator facility if commercial power goes out such as solar power and hydrogen fuel cells and batteries that can run on their own for about a week. “Our case is really scalable, so it could meet headend and data center” needs depending on their load, said DiGiacomo, who runs those operations for SCTE. “We want to make sure that we have the best available power” that’s reliable, he said. Top operators are working with vendors to come up with efficiency standards for equipment, so servers shut down when not needed, “key to our smart network,” Dzuban said. “The brain is functioning so that it can hear when commands come down to react."

Operators need to plan 10 years out for electricity usage and work with utilities on service quality, supply and pricing, SCTE staff said. They said the group’s trying to come up with standards in this area to reduce costs and increase reliability. A cable data center “isn’t something that you build every year, this is a 10-year strategy,” DiGiacomo said. “You have to be aligned with the 10-year availability of power.” Adaptive power interface standards for backend equipment mean they can use less power when customer demand for data’s lower at off-peak times, SCTE officials said. “Instead of an on or off state, it could be a throttle” state for a “comatose” piece of equipment that’s not needed at a particular time, DiGiacomo said: This work is “taking power strategy to the forefront” at operators and planning “energy by design.”

Energy Star’s Influence

DOE may get set-tops meeting energy efficiency standards deployed more quickly by a voluntary deal with operators, executives said. They said both energy conservation advocates and executives thought such a pact would be the better way to go. “The idea of the DOE as regulating the energy use of set-tops just didn’t strike many people in the room as the way to go,” Johnson said of the May meeting at the department (http://xrl.us/bnhgkx). Participants want to “think outside the box,” he said. The cable industry’s talks for a voluntary set-top efficiency agreement are “having success” with groups like NRDC “because they realize it’s in cable’s self-interests” to use less energy, Goldberg said.

DirecTV hopes to deploy a 4.0-certified box once the EPA releases the final specifications to update Energy Star, Dulac said. “We are a huge proponent of the program,” which “deserves the credit in a really big way of the energy gains that have been made,” he said. MVPDs buy Energy Star boxes they don’t develop, or use boxes not certified as such but with similar capabilities, because the manufacturers are already selling them, Dulac said. “Energy Star’s influence extends just beyond the boxes that end up with an Energy Star label on them.” DirecTV’s advanced boxes have “a modest light sleep” power setting, and after four hours of inactivity they enter that mode, Dulac said. He estimated it saves 10 percent or less power than a box without any sleep capabilities: “It only drops a little bit in power."

All set-tops AT&T gives to customers of its U-verse pay-TV service are Energy Star-certified, a spokeswoman said. The devices are IP-based, “one of the more energy efficient technologies,” she said. Time Warner Cable for the last few years has been working with other operators, vendors, EPA and CableLabs to improve energy efficiency, a spokesman said. “We're continually upgrading our networks, our services and our equipment and implementing new business strategies that result in greater energy efficiency and subsequently less overall reliance on the set-tops.” The company’s working to get hard drives that use less power and to get more advanced chips capable of light sleep and eventually deep sleep, he said.

Time Warner Cable is “continually upgrading our networks, our services and our equipment and implementing new business strategies that result in greater energy efficiency and subsequently less overall reliance on the set-tops,” the spokesman said. The operator’s working to get more advanced chips, more efficient hard drives and “moving more functions from the box into the cloud,” he said. “The more functions and the more information that we are pulling from the cloud, the less hard drive space and the less content the set-top box will need to be accessing on its own.” Time Warner Cable is “working with the CE companies and making our apps work on different tablet devices and smart TVs,” so “customers have more options and ways to interface with our products than just through the set-top,” the representative said.

Cablevision’s remote-storage DVR eliminates the need for a hard drive in set-tops, with the operator’s network storing the TV shows a DVR Plus user wants to watch later, a spokesman said. Cablevision won a case in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals finding that storage didn’t violate copyright law, a ruling Aereo hopes to take advantage of in streaming broadcast-TV programming to devices. “You now have storage being shared in the cloud, and none of the set-top boxes need to have a disc drive, so they share the disc resources in the cable network,” Brown said. “The industry is looking at new and creative ways, not only to offer service, but to be efficient about how they do it.” IP streams directly to cable subscribers’ devices without the intermediary of a set-top and growing use of home networking devices “change kind of the energy envelope,” he said.

Broadcasters ‘Build for Shrinkage'

No longer storing old audio and video and electronic files on discs and other physical media and instead keeping it digitally is reducing the amount of space TV stations need, said executives of the two broadcasters responding to the survey. They said almost all TV stations have entirely done away with physical tape storage, and those that haven’t have eliminated it almost completely. Representatives of Gray and Hearst Television, which owns 29 TV outlets, said their facilities have entirely or almost completely eliminated such physical storage. Other companies, NAB and the Society of Broadcast Engineers had no comment.

Saving electricity increasingly among broadcasters means smaller facilities, because there’s often thousands of square feet of space not being used, said Ocon. Using electronic instead of tape-based storage saves room, and less space to heat and cool and fewer air conditioners and other ventilation systems, industry executives said. “If you don’t need to have 28 air conditioners on your roof, there is some real payback there,” Ocon said. “As you move to a more digital work flow, we're finding the racks that are required are reduced, maybe by a third.” Gray’s larger buildings are shutting down parts of offices, including entire floors, he said.

"A lot of broadcasters, Gray included, are in antiquated buildings,” Ocon said. “The days are gone, except for the biggest markets,” where stations need to use 100,000 square feet, Ocon said: “We want to build for shrinkage, not build for expansion” of facilities. He estimated that power comprises about 5 percent of the company’s operating expenditures, with transmitters using $10,000 to $15,000 monthly in electricity. Using more energy efficient transmitters is important as Gray’s stations on UHF band channels have higher wattage transmissions than those on the VHF portion of the TV band, Ocon said.

"Many Hearst stations already have moved to file-based solutions,” a spokesman said. “We have remnants of tape still in use, and have tape archives. But within a few years Hearst stations will have largely done away with acquiring/generating new tape.” Such tape “accounts for substantial cubic volume and tons of disposable material,” the spokesman said. “Stations will still use discs, but of course these are less of an energy/environmental burden.” Studio sizes also are being reduced, and they and towers are using LEDs, Ocon said. Stations have been switching to fluorescent bulbs and considering the LEDs that are “very power efficient” and “expensive,” he said. “LED lighting I think is definitely revolutionizing how studios illuminate things.” Using less equipment in studios reduces their space needs, Ocon said. “The viewers don’t care about the size of the building -- they care about the studio and the content.”