Author
Elizabeth Brodsky
Categories
Sustainability Broadband Networks FTTX Access
The following guest blog post was provided by Elizabeth Brodsky, sustainability manager at Liberty Global. It was first posted on Liberty Global’s website on Nov. 26, 2020. As with all CommScope-hosted blog posts, any opinions or comments below are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CommScope.
Years of hard work and collaboration between the Liberty Global Product and CR teams has paid off as our newly released, state-of-the-art Mini TV Box captured the 2020 VideoTech Innovation Awards in the Sustainability category
This prestigious award salutes the ingenuity of product design and the impact that digital technology will have on our environmental footprint. In our day-to-day lives, digitalization has become indispensable, yet our growing reliance on new technology comes an increasing digital carbon footprint. The negative impacts of the digital world – increased energy consumption and toxic e-waste, to name a few – cannot be ignored. Innovation and sustainability need to work hand in hand to mitigate any negative impact technological advancement brings, which is why creating products like our Mini TV Box is more important than ever before.
The Mini TV Box is our smallest, greenest ever set-top-box and that’s not a coincidence. From inception to creation it was designed by the standards in our Sustainability Product Scorecard – our unique tool to identify our products’ most important social and environmental impacts. Our goal is to ensure that sustainability is front and centre at the start of the product development process and that the cross-functional teams involved ensure the impact commitments of the scorecard and our environmental statement. We want to make products that have an environmental and social story our customers will love and feel proud of.
We could not be more delighted with our Mini TV Box. Jointly designed and manufactured by CommScope, its size is a marvel, weighing in at just 97 grams; it’s seriously small and can fit in the palm of a hand, which equates to a huge reduction in plastic. The box itself is made from 35% recycled plastics and has no single-use plastic in its casing. Even more impressive is its extremely low power consumption which, at max, is 5W – a 77% energy reduction from our previous box. It can be powered by your TV via a USB cable, which means it doesn’t even require access to a power socket and can run off Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection from cable, fibre or mobile source.
The sustainability elements incorporated into the box do not mean that we’ve compromised on the all-important user experience, in fact, this device has all the same great features of a traditional set-top-box, and more. Powered by our next-generation TV platform Horizon 4, the box gives customers complete control over their entertainment experience by providing access to a full spectrum of content, including live TV, replay TV, on demand content and access to a range of in-built OTT apps, all in crystal-clear image quality up to 4K, combined with Dolby sound.
By embedding sustainability into our product design, we are ensuring that as our business grows, our environmental impact does not. We want all our customers to feel guilt-free when they enjoy their in-home and on-the-go entertainment, and we will continue to bring this sustainability lens to all our product innovation going forward.
