The FCC’s cableCARD initiative was supposed to crack open the proprietary set-top box provided by the cable operators and give consumers more box choices.
The idea was that you would purchase a PCMIA card for decrypting the cable signal and then have the luxury of inserting your CableCARD into a huge selection of third-party boxes, from the likes of TiVo, Roku, and zillion of others.
You know the kind of openness and standards we’ve come to expect from computers, mobile devices, software platforms, and Industrial-age screws, nuts, and bolts.
But this is the cable companies we’re talking about, the guys who have to be told to innovate by the FCC.
The CableCARD saga has been going on for over a decade (since 1996 and the Communications Act of that year) but a recent NPRM may have finally gotten it right.
The whole story is too long and painful to relay, involving bad initial rules from the FCC, cable operator resistance, an industry successor standard, called tru2way, with its own limitations.
In other words, business as usual in the regulated world of cable.
The new CableCARD rules address the issue of handling a switched video stream, which is a way for the cable companies to just send the channels a subscriber has signed up for and thereby conserve on bandwidth. The rules would require third-party boxes to support switched video cards.
It’s hard to believe in the era of IPTV hardware from the likes of Apple, boxee, and others, the cable world’s openness project is still dealing with pulling signals off the pipe.
By the way, only a few set-top boxes were ever certified to support CableCARD, most of them from the cable companies. CableCARD, as the FCC finally admitted, gets a D for spurring a third-party set-top box ecosystem.
For the record, TiVo supports this computer card, Roku doesn’t
The Notice of Proposed Rule Making goes into effect next month. Expect challenges from all the usual suspects.
Related articles
- John Baab: Comcast Cable Card Madness (baablogic.net)
- FCC’s CableCard Deal: Effective August 8 (commlawblog.com)
