Emergency ‘Wake-up’ Feature of ATSC 3.0 TVs Won’t Guzzle Standby Power, LG Says
Developers of the Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) for the ATSC 3.0 broadcast system said at last week’s ATSC 2015 Broadcast TV Conference that the next-gen emergency alerting system will use “standard protocol” to “wake up” ATSC 3.0 receivers during an emergency and deliver “rich-media features” such as video and evacuation routes. LG, one of several AWARN developers, also expressed preliminary confidence that any ATSC 3.0 device poised for AWARN emergency wake-up, including TVs, but also tablets and smartphones, won’t require excessive standby power for the function to work.
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A Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report recently took aim at CE devices that draw significant idle-load power in standby mode (see 1505070038). “Much of this always-on energy provides little or no benefit to the consumer because most devices are not performing their primary function and home occupants are not actively using them,” the report said.
LG, a partner in AWARN, demonstrated AWARN’s alerting functionality on a WebOS 2.0 smart TV at the NAB Show (see 1504130028) and did so again at last week’s ATSC conference. “While actual devices have not yet been designed and deployed that have a ‘wake up’ feature, it’s likely that only a minimal amount of power would be needed to awaken a device in the event of an emergency,” emailed an LG spokesman when asked about the standby power that would be needed for AWARN wake-up functionality. “Such functionality would have obvious public safety advantages, including the potential of saving lives.”
Most Energy Star-certified TVs in their factory defaults consume less than a watt of standby power when they're plugged in, but not in active mode, the NRDC has said. Asked whether the AWARN wake-up feature would be able to operate on TVs within the contours of their existing standby power or would they require additional standby power, the LG spokesman said: “I can’t give a specific number, because that particular product feature hasn’t yet been designed into a device. But LG believes that it could be accomplished with a very small amount of power (with a focus on small mobile devices with limited battery life).”
It’s too early to say whether the AWARN emergency-alerting "wake-up" feature for ATSC 3.0 would need to be activated as a standard factory default, or activated after set-up by a consumer as a menu option, much like the quick-start feature on current TVs, Brian Markwalter, CEA senior vice president-research and standards, emailed us. “CEA's companion standards effort to ATSC 3.0 is driven by liaison contributions and necessarily tracks with more complete areas of ATSC's work,” Markwalter said. “Emergency Alerting has not been discussed yet.” Those discussions would take place in a new R4WG18 working group that CEA established in February on ATSC 3.0 receivers (see 1502020043). The working group’s charter "is to develop standards, recommended practices and technical reports on receiver guidelines, profiles and characteristics in support of the ATSC 3.0 emission standard," CEA has said.
NRDC is “confident” TV makers will be able to build energy-efficient AWARN wake-up functionality into their products if they do the implementation properly, Senior Scientist Noah Horowitz emailed us. “While we have found several examples of internet connected TVs that consume 20 or more Watts when turned off due to the selection of the Quick Start feature, some of the latest LG and Samsung models restart quickly yet only draw less than a Watt in standby,” Horowitz said.
As for AWARN, “today we have computers that only need a watt or two to always be available to wake up at any time to receive a highly critical patch or software update from the network,” Horowitz said. “Similar concepts and low power solutions can be deployed for AWARN. Products on the market today have shown that we no longer need to choose between low standby power and fast resume times, or the ability to wake for an update. We are confident that well designed TVs will provide consumers with the valuable public safety information that has been sent by local officials without requiring high amounts of standby power. Conversely the new AWARN capabilities being developed could result in massive amounts of increased standby power by those manufacturers who rush their products to the market and don't pay attention to the details."