Power usage

6 watts, quoted on the apple spec site: http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html

 

You gave me an excuse to use my Kill-A-Watt replacement, the Belkin Conserve energy monitor.

Here's my results with some quick tests:

On but doing nothing: 1.7W
Streaming a movie (SD): 2.3W (iTunes)
Streaming a movie (HD): 2.3W (iTunes)
Streaming music: 1.7W (iTunes)
YouTube: 1.9W
Netflix: 1.8-2.1W
Sleep: 0.9W

Very nice overall!

The old Apple TV used to constantly draw around 22W if I remember correctly (I can check if anyone cares), so we're talking about a VAST improvement!

 

I don't know much about watts and how electricity works, but that seems GREAT in comparison to my 55 LED using 178 watts. (Not that I'd expect it to be anywhere near that of a television set.)

 

The Apple TV is phenomenal in this regard (even though LED backlit TV's are the most efficient out there).

In fact, I've seen standby wattage of devices that's higher than the Apple TV's operating wattage.

For comparison a PS3 uses 70-170W to play a Blu Ray (depending on which generation of PS3), while a Samsung Blu Ray player uses 32W for Blu Ray (24W to stream Netflix)!

 

The power usage is amazing and quite an energy saver over using my XBOX 360 to stream Netflix and movies from my iMac.