Cable set top boxes are energy vampires

A new study has found that some cable TV set-top boxes use more energy than your refrigerator or your air-conditioning. Why is this? Because, even when the power light is off, the box is communicating 24/7 with the cable or satellite network, so that if you want your TV instantly, it is there when you turn it on. It is much worse if you have a DVR (digital video recorder); that consumes 40% more electricity than the basic cable box.

Compare this with computers, which we shut down and which take their sweet time when we turn them back on. Imagine your TV being like that? Cable companies say their customers simply won’t tolerate it. Still, boxes in some European countries can automatically go into standby mode when not in use, cutting power by half. They can also go into a “deep sleep,” which can reduce energy consumption by about 95%. Low-energy European systems reboot from deep sleep in 1-2 minutes. But here in the US no one has been clamoring for energy efficiency, so nothing has changed. Spoilt aren’t we?

In our house we get basic cable from Time Warner. We rent their high-def, non-DVR box - a Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco) Explorer 4250HDC. That's apparently relatively energy-efficient as these things go. (This webpage has some interesting comparisons with the boxes for DirecTV or The Dish and the internet.)

So what is to be done about it, if anything at all, if cable providers are not feeling any pain from consumers?

I thought of turning off the cable box via a power strip switch. I could live with it taking a couple of minutes to reboot when I turn it on. But a better alternative may be to get rid of cable TV altogether. We just don’t watch enough TV to justify its expense, let alone the energy use. In the future we may see the cable box go away anyway, as the internet and apps become dominant. However this is part of a larger debate we all need to have: there are energy efficiencies from broadcasting and traditional cable for a wide audience that may simply disappear if we are streaming fragmented content to multiple individuals, which seems to be where we are headed. There is also the battle between TiVo, Google and Microsoft on the one hand (aggregating searchable content, which consumers like) and the cable/dish providers and content producers on the other (who thrive on dispersed content in silos, which consumers do not like). It is the latter who have the upper hand right now.

The above study was funded by the EPA and conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Ecos Consulting.