Accedo (IBC exhibitor, booth 5.F40) has published the results of a study of energy usage across different streaming devices and popular applications, resulting in some UX recommendations to minimise consumption in the home. The study found, for instance, that autoplay content on the home screen “dramatically” increases energy consumption, although this needs to be kept in context. The study found that Smart TVs use around 51W with energy saving enabled and screen backlight set to 20%, and on Smart TVs with lower screen brightness settings, the average power consumption across all tested apps was around 52W.
In general, the variation among apps across different devices was minimal but Accedo offers this advice to keep app energy requirements down:
- Consider using darker aesthetics.
- Implement energy saving features such as ‘Skip Intro’ or ‘Are you still watching?’
- Reduce the volume of animated content.
- It even suggests media companies could prompt consumers to switch devices or perhaps more realistically, adjust backlight settings.
The study found that set-top-boxes only use a small amount of energy (Amazon Fire approx. 1.5W, Sky Puck 3W, YouView 10W), while gaming consoles use around 70 watts of energy. It notes that watching direct on a Smart TV removes this energy component.
Smart TV energy consumption rises dramatically if backlight settings are increased. The study shows that with default backlight settings at 80%, LG WebOS TV would use around 120W and Tizen 2016 would use around 130W during playback. Switching energy saving off increases these further to around 170W for LG TV and around 200W for Tizen.