Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
CEA joins Into Tomorrow to discuss how electronics are saving consumers money:
American consumers have now saved more than $500 million on their energy bills, all thanks to a new industry initiative that’s improving the energy efficiency of set-top boxes. Lexie de los Santos with the Consumer Electronics Association explains – in this week’s “CEA Update.”
The set-top box voluntary agreement among the pay-TV industry, consumer electronics manufacturers and energy efficiency advocates is designed to deliver comprehensive energy and related cost savings for consumers and reduce the industry’s environmental footprint.
The latest independent progress report shows that over the first two years the set-top box agreement has saved consumers more than $500 million on their energy bills and avoided three million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Last year, set top boxes used roughly 14 percent less energy than those devices previously issued by service providers. And 95 percent of service providers’ set-top box purchases in 2014 met ENERGY STAR’s Version 3.0 standards
To learn more about the report and the industry’s sustainability efforts visit CE.org.
For Into Tomorrow, Lexie de los Santos – CEA
Listener Raquel in Odessa, Texas asked us whether or not she should consider switching streaming services:
I’ve been hearing things about Apple Music and now Tidal. I’ve been using Spotify. Are they worth changing over to, and if so, why?
Frankly it’s probably not worth the effort of rebuilding your playlists at this point.
If you have any Apple device, Apple Music is handy in that it integrates with Siri, and if you want to try it, why not? it’s free for the first three months, so by all means, give it a try. They have a very, very large catalogue and they have support from a huge number of artists, many of whom even guest host their own shows on Apple’s Beats 1 radio station.
Tidal is a different story… it was launched in 2014 by a company named Aspiro, last March it was purchased by Jay-Z in what frankly looks like a “me too!” move to own a streaming music service like the one that made Dr. Dre a billionaire. Tidal is not Beats Music though, ask your friends and see how many of them know it even exists. Tidal is not really catching on, it went from being on the top 20 list of the Apple Store charts to so low you’d have to work to find it on the list at all.
It’s not cheap either, their website is titled “Tidal: High Fidelity Music Streaming,” but the “HiFi plan” will cost you $20/month… When your streaming plan make Apple’s look cheap, you have a problem.
They do have lower fidelity plan they call “premium” which does stream at the same bitrate as Spotify and costs the same money (assuming you’re even paying for Spotify, since you don’t have to), but why leave Spotify to get at best the same deal? You’d have to start rebuilding your library to get nothing more than what you already had.
Jay-Z is also having some issues to pay Sony for the licensing fees they agreed upon, so they may be losing one of the big three labels, but at least for now they’re all in, which means that you can expect a good library of songs. Tidal does offer a 30 day free trial, so you can give them and Apple Music a shot and see how they compare with Spotify for you, it won’t cost you anything.