jules.tv

Green TV is becoming a buzzword right now. Sky TV has just announced a range of measures to protect the environment whilst making Television. These include energy efficient studios, upgrading set-top boxes to automatically go into standby and promoting eco-friendly TV production to Production companies.

One of the methods is sending updates via satellite to their customers set top boxes which will put the boxes on standby mode if it isn’t in action for 2 hours at night or 4 hours in daytime.

The broadcaster says it will save a massive 90,000 tonnes of CO2. At Sky HQ in West London they are building a £233million production centre which will use the heat emitted by the studio lights to provide an air-conditioning system, They are also looking to get the go ahead for two turbines to top up their significant energy requirements.

Sky is encouraging indies via a forum to use energy efficient lighting and reduce the use of tapes in favour of solid state media. They claim the next series of Gladiator will use 35% less energy than the last – that won’t apply to the production team itself no doubt.

Pictured above is Integreatmedia’s  vision for the next generation of camcorders which Designer David created for this site. Introducing the Turbine powered Z10!

In all seriousness, I’m all for going green. Ways I can see this working at the coalface of production are:

• More homeworking during times of pre-production to save using cars, public transport, limos etc.
• Being regularly hooked up via the Web to the Editor who works at home on their own power efficient desktop suite whilst I direct from the comfort of my sofa on my Web enabled Sky TV system.
• Less Coke on shoots, too many cans in the world.

If you have any brainwaves for green TV Production please send me a comment. PS I allow you to link to your online CV.