Via eHomeUpgrade, I read this post from Shelly Palmer, chair of the Advanced Media Committee of the New York chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (I’ve highlighted two key sentences in bold):
An array of technology firms, including major computer and TV-set manufacturers, is pressing federal regulators to enforce new set-top-box rules against the cable industry.
Cable operators are resisting implementation of a Federal Communications Commission rule that would ban the deployment of new integrated set-tops after July 1, 2006, effectively meaning that all new boxes would need to function with the CableCARD conditional-access device.
“The time has come to end consumers’ exclusive reliance on [set-top boxes] provided by their cable company. In fact, it’s long overdue,” Hewlett-Packard Co. executive vice president Shane Robinson said in a Feb. 17 letter to the FCC.
The CableCARD mandate is designed to establish a retail set-top market, and the technology firms maintained that the creation of such a market requires that cable operators support the CableCARD in all new boxes that they provide their customers.
Cable insists that the mandate would drive up box costs without creating new value for consumers.
In a separate letter, H-P joined 11 other companies, including Sharp Electronics Corp. and Dell Inc., in urging the FCC to reject cable’s proposal that the agency should eliminate the ban or postpone its effective date by 18 months.
“The only way to ensure that consumers enjoy the benefits of a competitive marketplace is to maintain the requirement that devices supplied by cable operators rely on the same CableCARDs for security that must be used by equipment supplied through competitive retail outlets,” the companies told the FCC in a Feb. 18 letter.
Read between the lines. The cable companies desperately want to lock you in to their hardware to maximize their profits and reduce your options. Their tactics now include stonewalling and spreading misinformation. The CableCARD initiative cuts their hardware out of the loop, giving alternative hardware providers (including makers of PC-based systems like Windows XP Media Center Edition) the option of tapping directly into the signal that comes over the cable into your home. The underlying technology is sound and secure. Through the use of strong encryption, the cable company gets assurance that only its subscribers will have access to the programming it delivers. Consumers get the option to record, time-shift, and expand their media options.
But the cable industry is doing everything it can to torpedo the move to CableCARD technology. They say it won’t “add value” to consumers. I say they’re dead wrong, and I have a perfect example to prove it.
Last Monday, I hopped on a plane to Seattle for a week’s worth of meetings. While I was away, my Media Center PC was busily recording the series I had asked it to keep for me. When I returned, I sat down in front of the TV and reviewed the list of recorded programs. Everything was there. So far, so good. Then I pressed the Play button to watch a program recorded on Friday and was rewarded with … an hour of pure nothingness. No video, no audio.
What happened? The Media Center PC is connected to a pair of digital cable boxes. It sends channel-change requests to the boxes via IR blaster. When I tried to switch to a live broadcast, I saw the infrared flashes hitting the sensor on the cable box, but nothing happened. A little further investigation revealed that the boxes had been powered down sometime early Tuesday. The front panel was still displaying the time, but the box wasn’t responding to channel-change requests, and no video or audio signals were coming over the connection to the Media Center PC. Every record request since Tuesday had resulted in an empty file.
I hadn’t had a power failure. The cable company had shut down the box via software, for reasons only it can explain. My HD-DVR (supplied by the cable company) continued to chug along, because its digital tuner and DVR are linked together. But the Media Center had no way of knowing that the cable box was powered down, nor did it have a way to force the box to turn back on. (This problem isn’t new, by the way. I’ve experienced the identical issue with my TiVo box over the past few years.)
If the Media Center PC were equipped with a CableCARD slot, this glitch wouldn’t have affected me. The signal would have continued to come over the wire, and the CableCARD would have eliminated the need for a dedicated decoder box. It would have eliminated the need for a digital-to-analog conversion, making it possible for me to see a better picture, perhaps even in HDTV. I could have used the Media Center program guide and series recording options instead of the inferior versions of both features that the cable company offers in its DVR. I would have had full access to all the storage on the Media Center instead of being restricted to the cable company DVR’s 30 hours of programming with no expansion allowed. In short, the combination of third-party hardware and the CableCARD would have added significant value to my TV-viewing experience.
Instead, I missed four episodes of The Daily Show. That’s certainly not a big problem. But it shouldn’t have happened.
I’ll be sending my comments to the FCC today.
Ed Bott 
Thanks for picking up this important topic Ed. The cable companies would rather things go back to their “good old days” — back when they had captive audiences who had little power over control over their entertainment consumption. We were forced to kowtow to their scheduling and much of their poorly crafted programming.
Now with the advent of time shifting devices, digital mobility, HDTV, IPTV and other entertainment options, the media consumer is taking their control back from the cable monopoly. Cable is only now reluctantly offering their own PVR technology and is not willing to innovate and provide the type of services available that the PC and CE manufacturers can and will at the consumer and free market demand.
The FCC should side with the consumer on this one and give the PC and CE companies the tools that they need. Outgoing FCC Chair Michael Powell did not call TiVo “God’s machine” for nothing. The technology is amazing. Microsoft’s Media Center PC is a great start but needs to be able to offer HD recording and the cable monopoly is trying to shut out this innovation so that they can profit at our expense.
Sounds like SIM cards for GSM mobile phones – your subscriber details are stored on a microchip on the card which is then inserted into the phone handset. Provided your phone isn’t locked to SIM cards from a particular network (many are but they can be ‘unlocked’) then you can use any SIM card with any phone.
I’m guessing that with CableCARD, you would get a smartcard from the cable company that you could then insert into your own equipment, instead of using the equipment provided. In which case, it sounds like a good idea 🙂 .
What’s worse is trying to brag about Media Center to my friends. I show them all the cool stuff it has. Then they ask a question, expecting an answer they can reply “COOL!” to…
‘So can it record all your shows in HD and stuff?’
Then I have to fumble around for an answer, “well, I can record over-the-air HD” — any answer beyond that is more technical than they can understand, generally, but the bottom line is “no, I can’t”
One more comment: IR Blasters are horrible, horrible (yet necessary) devices.
For me, I haven’t even purchased digital cable because I don’t want to deal with IR Blasters. I use standard old analog cable, 2 tuners. And 1 OTA HD tuner. As soon as I can use a cable card in my media center, I will pay for digital cable.