LOUISVILLE, CO – Digital set-top boxes used by the U.S. cable industry this year are projected to offer energy savings of 20% or more when the devices shift into a new ‘light sleep’ mode,according to recent evaluations by CableLabs – Energy Lab.
‘Light sleep’ refers to a lower-power condition that allows essential activities within a set-top box to continue while energy consumption associated with other tasks, such as channel tuning and video display, is discontinued.
As part of a major new cable industry energy conservation initiative announced last Fall, the six largest U.S. cable companies, serving approximately 85% of U.S. cable households, committed to the deployment of a ‘light sleep’ option for new set-top boxes beginning in September 2012. To further accelerate energy savings in the millions of existing digital set-top boxes, the operators will also provide software upgrades to set-tops boxes already in consumer homes to enable light sleep in models capable of the functionality.
The CableLabs findings about power consumption savings from ‘light sleep’ are based on measurements of three commonly used brands of digital set-top boxes from prominent cable industry suppliers, each running electronic program guide (EPG) software that represents the majority of U.S. cable-EPG deployments and tested on cable headends maintained at CableLabs. CableLabs – Energy Lab is a new facility within the cable industry’s research and development consortium that concentrates on improving energy efficiency.
“Our CableLabs Energy Lab test measured further reductions of 20% or more by implementing light sleep,” said Ralph Brown, CableLabs chief technology officer, in the announcement. “Applying EPA estimates for how long a typical set-top powers down and the average energy savings we measured, this indicates annual energy savings of about 35 kilowatt hours per set-top. We anticipate that operators will have more than 10 million set-top boxes in light sleep operation by the end of this year.”
