Brad on Broadcast

More ways to save on energy

This series on reducing a facility’s power consumption has focused on those areas most easily modified to save on power costs — the HVAC system and lighting — all beginning with an energy audit.

There are, however, other areas an engineer may want to consider. Let’s look at a couple.

Disk drives

Let’s begin our examination with hard disk drives. What used to be kilowatt-consuming devices, today’s individual HDD draw relatively little power. However, as video files get larger, the need for ever-increasing storage is obvious. Fortunately, drives are smaller and faster than ever. And, that trend will continue. more

Last week, the employees of this company (Penton) began a “furlough” of one day per week for the next four months. Basically, the company is shutting down on Fridays. Employees were told to enjoy the extra time with their families.

Yep, enjoy that extra time off, maybe take the kids to Disneyland or something. Whoops, don’t forget to take into account the accompanying 10 percent cut in pay you’ll experience. more

Using Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs

If you’ve already started replacing your standard incandescent lamps with Compact Florescent Lamps, more commonly known as CFLs, you are well along the path of saving electricity. Let’s examine some of the reasons CFLs are being required and how they can safely be deployed in your facility. more

There were plenty of 3-D demonstrations at this year’s NAB convention. Now there’s an actual non-movie implementation.

The soon-to-be-released game Resident Evil 5 will be available in 3-D according to the game’s manufacturer. The PC version, available later this fall, will require an Nvidia GeForce 3-D Vision card and 3-D glasses. Unlike other games, which claim to be 3-D, this game’s images are generated as actual 3-D imagery, not as converted images. However, Nvidia says you better have a powerful computer to run the 3-D game.

After you buy the game, the additional hardware can set you back another $200 for just the GeForce Vision kit with glasses. Or, you can buy a bundle with a Vision-ready monitor for $600.

I’ve started an ongoing tally of engineers’ responses to my question, “When will you turn off your DTV transmitter?” It’s parsed in the sense I’m asking “when” would you turn off your OTA digital transmitter. Usually I first get a “You’ve got to be kidding” response. After some discussion, the answer becomes a bit more circumspect.

As of today, less than 3 percent U.S. households haven’t prepared for the DTV conversion. That means that these households have not purchased satellite or cable service, nor have they obtained a DTV converter box. This represents a 50 percent improvement over the number of households who were not prepared for the loss of analog television back in December. more

The benefits of an energy audit

The last article reviewed the certainty of increased power bills. Upcoming new regulations regarding how power is generated could result in power bills increasing by almost 20 percent. In addition, corporations are receiving increased pressure to become better citizens and consumers of power and natural resources. more

The Apple computer company has forced the public Web site BluWiki to remove a series of articles and discussions on user modifications for the iPod and iPhone products. Apple threatened legal action against the owner of the Web site, OdioWorks, unless the Web site removed certain pages, which discussed ways to modify the Apple products to they would operate with other (non-Apple) software.

Apple’s shutdown demand to the noncommercial and public Internet wiki was designed to force the Web site’s owners to remove any discussion on making iPods and iPhones compatible with media management software such as WinAmp and Songbird. However, this action was called a violation of the users’ First Amendment rights, according to an April 27 lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). more

Ask any engineer how much power it takes to operate the TV station, and you’ll probably get what it costs to operate the transmitter. Dig deeper and ask what it costs to operate the studios, and you’ll probably get a blank stare.

What most engineers don’t realize is that there’s an even larger power hog in the broadcast and content producer space. Today’s video production facilities require huge amounts of power from the nation’s electrical grid. If there’s a positive side to these facts, it’s that such power consumption is continuous. Broadcasters draw the same power from the electrical grid 24 hours per day. The consumption doesn’t drop at 5 p.m. and stay low all night, again peaking at 8 a.m. the next morning. more

As if broadcasters don’t already have enough to worry about, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 supporting the FCC’s sanctions against Fox for a pair of live Billboard Music Award broadcasts containing the swear words s*** and f***. The obvious words were uttered respectively by Cher and Nicole Richie way back in 2002 and 2003.

Those broadcasters over the age of 40 may remember the famous 1978 case where the FCC charged the Pacifica Foundation with indecency because George Carlin spoke his famous “Seven Dirty Words” in a radio broadcast. The case ended up in the Supreme Court, which ruled in support of the commission, saying that the FCC could sanction the station. more