Consumers have saved $3.5 billion and more than 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have been avoided as a result of the voluntary set-top box energy conservation agreement among pay TV providers, manufacturers and energy efficiency advocates, according to independent auditor, D+R International.
The energy saved during the first five years of the programme is enough to power all homes in Los Angeles County with electricity for almost a year, the report says.
Signatories of the voluntary agreement include all of the major multichannel video service providers, representing more than 93% of the US market (AT&T, DirecTV, Comcast, Charter, Dish, Verizon, Cox, Cablevision, Frontier and CenturyLink), major manufacturers (Arris, Technicolor and EchoStar Technologies) and energy-efficiency advocates (Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy).
D+R found that the voluntary agreement has reduced national annual STB energy consumption by 34% since 2012, nearly enough to eliminate the annual generation produced by four typical 500-megawatt coal-run power plants. These energy savings have been achieved even as functionality and features of set-top boxes have increased significantly over this period.
Year-on-year energy savings increased by nearly 50% from 2016 to 2017 as companies successfully completed their commitment to meet an even more rigorous set of energy efficiency levels that became applicable in 2017, under the terms of the agreement developed with energy efficiency advocates and endorsed by the Department of Energy in 2013.
In 2017, 97.5% of service providers’ STB purchases met these new levels, better than the 90% commitment under the voluntary agreement. D+R found that savings were also bolstered by the fact that nearly all DVRs in the field today were purchased under the agreement’s energy-efficiency standards, and that new DVR models now use an average of 46% less energy than the models purchased prior to the agreement. Jennifer Amann, buildings programme director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy remarked:
“To date, the voluntary agreement has brought progress in STB energy efficiency — in the form of energy and cost-savings — to more than 90 million US households.
We look forward to continuing to work with the industry to ensure ongoing improvements to set-top boxes and related advances will save consumers even more on energy costs while reducing emissions”.
CTA’s VP of technology policy, Doug Johnson, also commented:
“The f
irst generation of federal set-top box energy regulations that was considered by the Department of Energy in 2013 by law could not have become effective until this year, and adoption of such rules could have impaired innovation in new equipment and services.
By contrast, the voluntary agreement is already moving toward its third generation of improved energy standards, has already saved consumers billions of dollars and has facilitated the roll-out of new services such as cloud DVR, multi-room services and Ultra HD STBs”.
According to Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council:
“Th
e cable, satellite and telephone companies have made significant progress in bringing down the energy use of the STBs they place in our homes.
The energy savings verified by D+R’s report are a big deal, and even more promising is the industry drive toward apps where consumers can access both live and recorded programming directly on their new smart TV or via a device that uses very little power like an Apple TV or Roku stick that they purchase.
This eliminates the need for an STB from their service provider and the energy costs and resultant pollution that come with it”.
To track the progress of energy savings resulting from the service providers’ apps, the revisions to the voluntary agreement adopted in 2018 as part of a four-year extension of its commitments required that service providers report the actual number of unique customer-owned devices that were used in the prior year to access their apps, such as smart TVs, low-power sticks or other devices that connect to TVs, tablets, smartphones and PCs.
Consumers used nearly 103 million of these devices to access the providers’ video services in 2017, compared to an estimated 207 million STBs still in the field. Some of these devices are used in addition to STBs, such as viewing on smartphones outside the home, while other use cases can replace STBs, such as viewing on tablets in rooms where the customer might have placed another television, or on smart TVs or connected TVs without an STB.
Every signatory supported apps, each on between four and fourteen different retail platforms, such as Samsung, LG, Roku and Roku TV, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV and Kindle Fire HD, Google Chromecast, Android and iOS tablets and smartphones, Xbox One and PCs. Additional platforms are under development, such as through Comcast’s Xfinity TV partner programme that is open to all platforms that support an HTML5 browser.
Neal Goldberg, NCTA’s General Counsel, said:
“The new data o
n consumer usage of apps shows that multichannel video providers have been successful in making their services available on a wide variety of retail devices in lieu of set-top boxes.
One-third of all devices used by consumers to access MVPD services in 2017 were not operator-provided set-top boxes and, as that percentage continues to increase, consumers will save even more energy, in addition to enjoying more choice in how they watch video”.
D+R confirmed the energy savings calculated in its report by reviewing data on every 2017 new STB purchase by pay TV providers, backed up by an in-depth audit of one randomly selected service provider, as well as energy testing inside customer homes conducted by Intertek Testing Services, an energy-testing firm.
