Green TV playout
Jan 1, 2010 12:00 PM, By Marco Lopez
New single-card processors can generate up to a 90-percent savings in power, space and materials.
A card-based multiviewer provides energy and space efficiency, with 20 multiviewers in 3RU, consuming just 300W.
As broadcasters strengthen their environmental credentials, and also look ahead to potentially higher electrical costs under cap and trade, they are now widening their perspective on energy savings to address the whole television process, from creation to transmission. This new emphasis on energy and space efficiency is now even impacting areas with lighter electrical consumption, such as playout equipment.
Traditionally, power savings at television stations has focused on transmitters and production studio lighting, as these represent the biggest offenders when it comes to power consumption. For instance, a single production studio can consume 400kW in lighting alone. Unsurprisingly, this heavy power usage has driven demand for lower consumption transmitters and innovations like LED studio lighting, which can save more than 90 percent of electrical costs.
Green values
This move toward greater energy efficiency has become broad-based, and is evident at local television stations, the major networks and many playout centers. It's happening by a process of ongoing upgrades, and most strikingly at new greenfield site facilities, which in some cases are even incorporating alternative energy production, including wind and solar power generation.
Figure 1. An up/down/crossconverter with an audio processor requires fewer parts.
Select figure to enlarge.
The worldwide television industry may not have been an early adopter of green technology, especially when compared to other industries such as mobile telephony, but it's now catching up fast. This shift toward green values has not gone unnoticed among broadcast equipment vendors, and they have responded with more energy- and space-efficient products for the breadth of the television playout process.
The latest generation of playout products is now delivering higher, 3Gb/s/HD/SD video performance, with substantially lower power consumption and greatly improved space efficiency. These new devices are also bringing many other diverse environmental benefits. For instance, they demand less cooling, they generate less noise, and they demand fewer resources for manufacture.
The cooling required by high power consumption isn't just another cost and energy consideration for broadcasters; it often demands a big, mechanical system that's often high maintenance, noisy and space consuming. Hence, reducing the cooling requirements of television equipment can lead to wide-ranging benefits.
The substantial improvements in energy efficiency of the latest generation of broadcast equipment have been made possible by ever more powerful chipsets, including FPGAs and CPUs. Over the last product cycle, this change has resulted in many core playout devices moving from dedicated 2RU or 1RU boxes, based on multiple boards, to single-card devices.
This process of moving to card-based solutions has spurred other nonenvironmental benefits, such as easier installation and maintenance, reduced cabling, and better integrated control systems, as well as fewer parts to fail. (See Figures 1 and 2.) In fact, power supplies have long been regarded as the most failure prone part of television equipment, and hence relying on fewer, lower-power PSUs should promote greater overall system reliability.
Specific savings
To be more specific about the potential savings in power, cooling, rack space and raw materials, let's consider a typical 10-channel playout facility and some of the key devices used for playout. Let's look at a cross section of essential devices at every facility: signal processing, channel branding and monitoring.
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