Vertatique has been covering the GreenICT implications of America's conversion to digital television (DTV) for the past couple of years: consumer e-waste, broadcaster e-waste, and consumer energy consumption*.

We noted in 2008 the EPA estimated there were 99.1 million (analog) TVs in storage at the end of 2007. This number has been revived in recent DTV conversion stories that rarely note it is a 2007 statistic likely to be significantly altered by the conversion completed in June 2009.

One can anticipate that energy/environmental impact might become a consideration in future e-infrastructure policy decisions and the DTV experience could provide valuable data, so three questions come to mind:

The search for data about TV stations' energy consumption elicited a comment from an industry colleague that it is "miniscule" compared to that of the station's viewers. How would we go about calculating the impact of a local station audience?

Beyond internal efforts, leadership organizations can engage stakeholders and others in their enterprise ecologies. I recently noted NewsCorp's efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of their own DVD productions. Of equal note is the investment they have made to create and publish sustainability resources for other media producers.

I was asked during my HPA sustainable media session to compare the carbon footprint of a movie delivered by DVD versus one delivered by streaming. It was a good question, but one that required much research.  Here's the first half of the answer.

The greenest purchase is often no purchase at all. Many items will have made much of their life-cycle energy/carbon impact by the time they hit our loading docks. "Sweating our assets" refers to getting more productivity and longer lifecycles out of what we already have, an even more critical skill now that access to cheap capital has diminished. There are two GreenICT reasons for doing this.

A recent article in Broadcast Engineering seems to imply that for most terrestrial broadcasters, their production studios consume more energy than their transmission chains (master control, STL, transmitter, tower, etc.). It would be useful to see the data on this, as this has bigger implications for the media industry than just Green ICT.

Proposed California Energy Commission regulations could mean significant changes to its consumer electronics market, possibly even the de facto end of plasma set sales.

The European Union established in late 2008 the EU Code of Conduct on Energy Efficiency of Digital TV Service Systems for "all companies dealing Digital TV Service Systems (service providers, broadcasters, STB manufacturers, silicon manufacturers, etc.)." The EU's site lists eleven companies that have already signed the code.

Multichannel News recently reported that "KNTV in San Jose . . . is powered entirely by wind". This article is widely referenced on the web, including in a Wikipedia citation. I was curious about this statement, knowing that the transmission operation alone for a terrestrial television broadcaster typically draws tens of kilowatts of power on a 24/7 basis.