As I was watching Spider-Man on hulu.com thinking about how I used to go to alloftv.net and alluc.net to watch tv online, I realized that if tv shows were watched more often online than on tv we could make a nice dent in energy consumption. TVs are vampires, constantly drawing from the grid even when they are off. Computers are too, but computers are more useful than TV, you can do a lot more things on a computer than you can on a TV such as blog about TV. TVs are good for watching shows, movies and playing video games....but you can play games and watch movies (well, not VHS) on a computer and now with more (and legally questionable) websites that let you watch your favorite shows online, the need for a tv is dwindling.
By using computers to perform the tasks that tvs used to do, we can reduce our energy and material consumption since there will be fewer tvs demanded and made. I think an obstacle to this is screen size. But this can be countered by increasing the use of projectors. But they require energy and materials making the switch less economic. Mmm, maybe future generations of lap tops will have a projector built into them...I may want to file that idea for a patent actually...mmm.
Speaking of intellectual property rights, the hulu.com thing got me thinking about pirating for the environment, but that's a subject for a future post.
