Electronic media are important components of global ICT as movies, television, music, and books all go digital. This post offers a global sampling of sustainability in e-media; see much more by clicking on the "Green media" tag, above.

NBC/Universal reports that The Tonight Show with Jay Leno "Reduced the show’s paper usage by 16 reams a week (or 1 tree a week, adding up to 50 trees every year) by utilizing digital distributions for paper-related materials." The production also "Transitioned to rechargeable batteries, which is currently saving 120 batteries a week or 5,400 a year."

Fujitsu announced that it has established a consolidated green product development standard based on the IEC 62075 framework covering the environmentally conscious design of AV and ICT equipment. The standard will encourage product designs which "promote resource efficiency and recycling", "reduce power consumption during…use", "reduce noise levels", and "avoid…use of hazardous materials".

Vertatique's comprehensive vision of ICT includes e-media infrastructures and practices. News Corporation one of the world's largest media empires, so the company is a logical one for us to track. We first began looking at NewsCorp in July 2006, when company executive (and chairman's son) James Murdoch talked about the media industry going green. Among his claims back then: NewsCorps' satellite broadcasting arm BSkyB is already "carbon neutral".

New ICT facilities inplementing the latest in Green ICT technologies and practices garner much publicity, yet a lot is being done with existing ones. This is the first in a series of posts that examines what is in existing ICT facilities around the world.

Computerworld reports that NBC Universal has implemented a variety of tactics in refurbishing its West Coast data center. The company "virtualized 60% of the physical servers and shut down 2,000 physical machines [and]uses cold containment aisles and a fiber topology that replaced 300,000 feet of copper cable and moved the cable plant overhead, rather than under raised floors. NBC also implemented smart power distribution units and rack-level environmental and power metering sensors, increasing rack densities by as much as 200%…The setup makes it easier to scale the data center efficiently by adding a row at a time…In total, the company retired and recycled 47 tons of hardware and cut power consumption by 11%."

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) announced that "it has assembled a record number of exhibitors who will showcase solutions for alternative energy and service assurance in the “Green Pavilion” at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo® in November in Atlanta, GA

ICT businesses continue to dominate Newsweek's 2011 Green Rankings of the top 500 US public companies, as they did in 2010* and 2009**. Four of the five top 5 companies are in the ICT sectors: IBM (#1), Hewlett-Packard (#2), Sprint (#3), and Dell (#5). All told, ICT sectors dominated the top 20 with 11 positions.

Here is a summary of studies on the e-delivery of software, movies, music, and books, compared with physical delivery, based on three studies from 2009.

The US ENERGY STAR program looks only at energy efficiency and not other sustainability factors. Twenty set-top box (STB) units for cable, IP, or satellite from seven manufacturers came in at less than 100W in the program's Total Energy Consumption (TEC) metric. Apple TV is the most efficient, helped by its very low stand-by power consumption. The unit has a number of other sustainability features, as well. Here is the list we derived from the ENERGY STAR database.

The Bloom Energy Server is a "distributed power generator" that uses fuel cells to convert air and natural gas into electricity. We wrote early 2010 that the 'Bloom Boxes' are "already being used by ICT companies, but not for for mission-critical ICT applications." Now we can report that they are.