News & Trends

As of May 2025, EU Regulation 2023/826 took effect to draw a bright line under the power budget for any display or device sitting in standby or networked standby. Commercial displays are excluded from the horizontal standby regulation, but any connected device in your signage stack—media players, servers, gateways, or mounts—falls under its scope. That includes external power supplies, battery-charging circuits that stay plugged in, motor-driven mounts, and network-connected control hardware. 

The regulation caps standby without a display at 0.5 W today, standby with a status display at 0.8 W, and networked standby at 2–8 W, depending on device category and High Network Availability (HiNA) functionality. In May 2027, these limits tighten further: 0.3 W for off mode, 0.3 W for standby without a display, 0.5 W for standby with a display, and 7 W for HiNA networked standby. If your signage relies on continuous connectivity, remote wake, or instant-on features, compliance will require significant adjustments.

What Networked Standby Means for Your Deployment

Networked standby is the state where a device maintains a network connection but isn't performing its primary function. The regulation requires automatic power management: devices must drop into the lowest applicable power mode within 20 minutes of inactivity, and power management must be enabled by default. 

If your player or gateway has wireless capability, the regulation mandates a way to deactivate those connections unless the device relies solely on a single wireless link for its intended use. That clause matters: a signage player with both Ethernet and Wi-Fi must let you disable Wi-Fi when the wired connection is live, or it risks pushing the unit over the networked-standby cap when both radios remain hot. 

HiNA devices—routers, switches, access points, hubs, and modems built to maintain continuous network availability—get an 8 W allowance in 2025 and 7 W in 2027. Standard devices, including media players, gateways, and smart-home hardware, must be limited to 2 W for networked standby from 2025 onward. If your signage architecture depends on a player or mini-server holding publish full technical documentation open a *Virtual Private Network) VPN tunnel, serving Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps, and listening for Wake-on-LAN (WoL) packets all at once, you'll blow through 2 W before the display even wakes. 

Spec Sheets Are About to Get More Honest

Manufacturers must publish full technical documentation by 2027, including power consumption in off mode, standby, and networked standby, plus a description of available power-management settings and how to activate them. That means you'll finally see real numbers for the idle state your fleet actually lives in, not just the on-mode brightness-weighted figure vendors love to quote. Check whether the declared networked standby figure assumes Ethernet only, or whether it includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth active radios. 

Check whether the vendor tested with remote-management agents running, or whether they pulled the network cable and called it "standby." If the spec sheet lists 1.8 W networked standby and you add an always-on VPN client, you're over 2 W and out of compliance. The regulation requires conformity assessment based on measurements under defined conditions, and enforcement authorities can pull units off the shelf and test them. If your deployment config pushes devices over the cap, you own the compliance risk alongside the vendor.

Sleep, Wake, and the Usability Trade

The 20-minute auto-sleep timer is mandatory. That works fine for a breakroom display that shows a dashboard during office hours and blanks overnight. It's a disaster for wayfinding signage in a hospital corridor, transit departure boards, or retail window displays that need to respond the instant someone approaches. Remote wake is the escape hatch: WoL, pattern-match offload, or a scheduled task that pulls the device out of standby before content needs to refresh. But remote wake costs power. 

A device waiting for a magic packet or a specific Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) frame must keep the network interface energised and the wake logic active. That power draw counts against your networked standby budget. If the wake circuit adds 1.5 W and your base standby is already 0.8 W, you're at 2.3 W and over the line. The alternative—disabling remote wake and relying on manual power-on or scheduled timers—leaves your fleet blind between wake cycles. No remote diagnostics, no emergency content push, no centralised monitoring until the unit wakes on its own. You saved half a watt but killed the deployment's operational flexibility.

Update Windows and Downtime You Didn't Budget

If your signage fleet can't stay in networked standby around the clock, you need a maintenance window. Schedule wake, pull updates, reboot, verify, then sleep again. That means scripting wake events across time zones, staggering updates so the network and content-management system don't choke, and accepting that units will miss content changes until the next window opens. It also means signage that's dark or cycling when a customer walks past. 

The regulation allows higher power during active use, so you could set devices to wake every two hours, sync for five minutes, then sleep again. But every wake cycle is a thermal and mechanical stress, a chance for a script to fail, and an opportunity for someone to walk up to a black screen and assume the system is broken. The compliance path that protects your watt budget can double your operational overhead and triple your field-support calls.

Design for 2027 Limits Now, Not Later

In May 2027, Phase two limits take effect, and the gap between now and then is shorter than most signage refresh cycles. If you're speccing hardware this quarter for a rollout that finishes in late 2026, those units will still be in the field when off-mode drops to 0.3 W and networked standby for HiNA devices falls to 7 W. Designing to the 2025 limits sets you up for a compliance failure or an expensive retrofit in eighteen months. 

Test proposed hardware against the 2027 caps, not the current ones. Verify that the vendor's roadmap includes firmware updates to meet the tighter limits, and confirm that power-management settings can be pushed and locked via your remote-management platform. If the vendor can't commit to 2027 compliance in writing, walk. The cost of ripping out and replacing a non-compliant fleet mid-deployment will dwarf the savings from choosing the cheaper box today.

What You Can Do Starting Tomorrow

Run an audit of every device in your signage stack that draws power in standby or maintains a network connection when idle. Measure actual consumption with a power meter under realistic conditions: Ethernet live, Wi-Fi enabled if applicable, remote-management agent running, and the device waiting for a wake event. Compare those figures to the 2 W networked standby cap for standard devices and the 7 W cap for HiNA hardware in 2027.

Identify units that exceed the limits and prioritise replacements or configuration changes. Disable unnecessary radios—if the unit has both Ethernet and Wi-Fi, turn off Wi-Fi when wired. Strip out unused remote-management features that keep the network stack hot. Test whether your content-management system can schedule wake events reliably, and map out a maintenance-window strategy that doesn't leave signage dark during peak hours. 

AVIXA's guidance on greener digital signage design offers additional strategies for energy-efficient components and power management that complement EU compliance efforts. Document your power-management policy and make it part of the handover to the client, because enforcement starts with the product placed on the market, but operational compliance is a shared responsibility. The regulation doesn't care whether your vendor sold you a compliant box if your deployment config pushes it over the limit.

The Real Cost Is Flexibility, Not Watts

The energy saved under Regulation 2023/826 is meaningful—an estimated 32.5 TWh per year across the EU by 2030, cutting 4.6 million tonnes of CO₂ and saving consumers €7 billion. But for always-on signage, the cost isn't measured in watts; it's measured in the features you lose to stay compliant. Remote diagnostics, instant content updates, centralised monitoring, and zero-downtime operation all depend on devices that sit in networked standby, burning more than 2 W.

AVIXA's Sustainability Advisory Group explores how to balance environmental goals with operational and business requirements in sustainable AV design—the exact trade-off you're making when choosing between compliance and "always connected." Sustainable AV design practices, including smart automation and power management, can help you meet these energy targets while maintaining operational flexibility. You can have compliance, or you can have "always connected." Pick one, and design the rest of the system around that choice before you order the first pallet.

My Verdict

Treat the 2027 limits as your design target today, not the 2025 caps. If your hardware can't prove sub-2 W networked standby with all your operational features enabled, it's not fit for a multi-year deployment. Measure real power draw under real conditions before you spec, and map out your sleep/wake policy alongside your content strategy. 

The usability trade is real, but the compliance deadline isn't negotiable—and retrofitting a non-compliant fleet in 2027 will cost you far more than getting it right the first time. Start with vendor datasheets that show 2027-compliant figures, not marketing claims. Build your maintenance windows now, test remote wake reliability under your actual network load, and price the operational overhead into your quote. Your client might accept a two-hour sync window at 3 AM, but they won't accept dark signage at 9 AM because a script failed.

Photo credit: Unsplash/Cova Software