feature green broadcasting
Feature sponsored by Harris
We think of energy savings and green targets in terms of what we ought to cut down on - by switching off lights, driving less, not heating or cooling empty rooms. Worthy as that is, it’s difficult to get excited about being greener if we confine ourselves to just that kind of mindset: it means doing less of what we’ve always done, and nobody really likes depriving themselves. It’s human nature to be more inspired by finding a new approach that offers green benefits. If, for example, we develop the habit of switching off in our own homes, but we also install smart energy technology and start selling electricity back to the grid, we will have achieved a solution that makes domestic as well as environmental sense. Ian Fletcher, CTO of OmniBus Systems, reports.
Transmission and automation
can be profitable & greener
I
n some industries the natural tendency of product development is to provide greater performance with more efficient resources: a fridge or washing machine sold in 2010 will almost certainly be much more energy efficient that the equivalent from five or 10 years ago. And no consumer will object to buying one, because they don’t have to accept a performance compromise - the fridge is just as good at being a fridge, even though it uses less power. But judging
by the continuing popularity of large- engined, fuel-heavy cars, not everyone is yet ready to convert to more economical and carbon-friendly transport. It’s difficult to give up performance you’ve become accustomed to.
Happily for broadcasters, it’s not necessary to compromise on performance in order to take big steps towards a lower carbon footprint. In fact, in some cases, better performance can co-exist with better energy consumption. Although it takes time for allegiances to familiar technologies and working methods to be abandoned in favour of smarter, more agile solutions, there are plenty of examples in our industry of the move away from proprietary hardware and toward software running on IT hardware. Non-linear editing is one: and the flexibility and features of NLEs quickly established their dominance over the editing world.
At OmniBus, our aim has always been to focus on a lean and agile approach to technology, and bring the benefits of that focus to our customers. We’ve been committed
14 l ibe l march/april 2010 l www.ibeweb.com
from the start to using software and standard IT hardware wherever possible in our products. Back in the mid-nineties, the green issue was not so high on the agenda, but to us it still made good business sense to develop products that were quicker to install and commission, less costly to run, and easier to maintain in operation - and because they were all these things, they were also greener. From many years of experience building automation and transmission chains from proprietary hardware components developed and supplied by multiple vendors, we were convinced that this was an
unnecessarily complex and costly way of getting channels on air. Complexity of this kind is not just costly, but wasteful too: a transmission chain made up of racks housing a range of discrete devices supplying only a small part of the functionality consumes far more power, space, cabling and cooling than it needs to. Clearly, if you could bring together automation, graphics, master control, logo insertion, audio processing, up/down conversion, playout and the other functions of a transmission chain
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