The Amazon Kindle Fire is getting lots of news, and part of the excitement is storing your content in the cloud, and not on the device. But, let's be clear, much of the content that will be stored will simply be a small unique identifier that says you have rights to a book, music, or movie. Storing, thousands of copies of the same MP3 music file in individual could accounts is wasteful and costly. Store one copy and point to the copy in individual accounts is a greener way.
Look at a device that is in millions of homes consuming as much power as a refrigerator, your cable STB.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has conducted a study that places the spotlight on how inefficient cable boxes and DVR's are in American homes.
These boxes, which guide cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions, run at a constant rate and can utilize more power than a new refrigerator or air conditioning unit.
There are millions of these STBs.
According to the study, there are 160 million set-top boxes in the U.S., and this number is increasing. These boxes run 24 hours per day, even when they're not being used. The study found that add-on DVR's use an additional 40 percent more power than the set-top box.
The Natural Resources Defense Council found that these boxes consume $3 billion in electricity per year in the U.S., and 66 percent of this power is drained when no one is even using it. Also, one high definition cable box and one high definition DVR use about 446 kilowatt-hours per year, which is 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot refrigerator that is energy efficient.
Maybe the Amazon Kindle Fire will gradually replace the cable STB. It is a much more energy efficient and storage efficient device.
The cable industry has pushed the STB a high energy cost to the consumer. Turning off the power to STB is a pain as turning it on means the device needs to reload the channel content which can take an hour. Doesn't this sound like an Enterprise IT solution? a monopoly?
An energy efficient green data center changes your strategy. Think of what the cable providers have vs. what Amazon has.