green broadcasting feature

into a single software application that runs on a standard hardware platform, you would have a much more compact and economical solution. Such a system would deliver significant capital cost savings, be much cheaper and easier to install, and require only a small proportion of the space and power.

Now, in 2010, that initial perception of what made good business sense neatly coincides with what makes good environmental sense, and with the iTX automation and transmission platform delivering more than a thousand channels around the world, the broadcasters who use it are achieving some serious savings in both environmental terms, and financially. But they are also doing this without having to compromise on performance: in fact several of the larger iTX customers have used it to launch breakthrough facilities and services at the top end of the broadcast market and have reported that the dramatically simplified signal path has resulted in enhanced picture quality. A greener transmission platform would not be attractive or successful if it meant broadcasters had to lower production standards, or provide a less sophisticated and crafted product.

Although it may not be as obvious a contributor to global warming as travel by air or on the roads, broadcast technology does consume a considerable amount of energy, and the transmission chain plays its part in this consumption. A single HD channel based on conventional automation and playout equipment consumes in the region of 2700 watts, calculated without including necessary hardware such as A/V routers shared with other channels, or the power consumption of cooling systems. The same channel configured to provide identical output but hosted on iTX needs no more than 25 or 30% of the space and requires 30% less power. There are large savings also in the ancillary infrastructure required: iTX drastically reduces the amount of cabling and cooling required to house a channel.

A rough extrapolation of those figures on consumption per hour using templates from the US Climate Technology Cooperative indicates that a single channel operating on iTX for one year would save the equivalent of 6.26 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions - or, to put it another way, the same as 2695 litres of petrol. However imprecise the templates

used to estimate figures like this may be, it’s clear that the impact of a technology like iTX can make a valuable difference in environmental terms. Worldwide, the number of channels is growing apace, so cumulatively these are not negligible savings. It helps of course that, for the broadcaster, there are significant financial savings too. An automation and transmission platform that delivers more features and performance than the conventional infrastructure can, is more energy- efficient to run, and requires substantially lower investment to buy and install, is not only greener but more profit-making. And looking at the medium and longer term, energy prices are forecast to rise very sharply, making any kind of saving on energy consumption more significant than it is today. With governments committing to ambitious energy targets, there is also the spectre of carbon offset costs and other energy levies on businesses to encourage efficiency. These are all factors that are feeding into the planning and purchasing strategies of broadcasters and media organisations. In place of the old best-of-breed approach to broadcast equipment purchasing, ROI analysis is more

frequently used now to calculate the impact of a range of designs and their cost implications. These calculations take in overhead and operational costs, equipment purchase- and-maintenance expenditure, training and staffing costs, and energy consumption. Results from this kind of analysis tend to point broadcasters towards leading-edge technologies that combine the

functionality of several separate components into a more efficient, flexible, economical and easily-managed platform. That is essentially the product design philosophy behind the iTX

platform, and it’s what allows broadcasters to achieve worthwhile energy savings by operating their channels with iTX. Operational savings

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A single HD channel based on conventional automation and playout equipment consumes in the region of 2700 watts, calculated without including hardware such as shared A/V routers, or cooling systems.

are just part of the picture, however. Any product creates its own carbon footprint in development and delivery. Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to keep this small if you are developing software, but software still requires hardware to run it. Because iTX is designed to use standard, high performance IT hardware, iTX customers can choose their own hardware supplier, and are always free to select products on the basis of the best performance and price ratio. The large IT manufacturers plough an increasing proportion of their huge R&D budgets into creating products that are more energy-efficient to operate, and into reducing the carbon footprint involved in building them and delivering them to the customer. HP, an OmniBus recommended supplier, was ranked the greenest Fortune 500 company in 2009, according to Newsweek. Industry in general is still in the early stages of the quest for reduced footprint, but companies of this prominence are in the public eye, and know very well that it’s a major part of their corporate social responsibility to continue to press for greener ways of doing business. Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48