Some news popped up today over on TiVo Blog about the Time Warner Cable Series 3 Cablecard issue. Time Warner at first stated that they would not be supporting the Series 3 saying "TiVo devices compete with some of the converters and/or 'on-demand' type services Time Warner provide".Now in a new email they seem to have changed their stance a little bit, after all if they refused outright to provide CableCards they would be going against FCC regulations. They have now said that they will supply CableCards with the Time Warner cable system but they will not be two way interactive.
It still seems to me that Time Warner are going out of their way to be difficult on this one. It might not look so bad if they were not already involved in suing Cablevision over the remote DVR service either. Suing Cablevision is not really bad in itself but considering the fact Time Warner Cable were the first to implement a remote DVR service but came up against legal pressure makes it worse.
1. When they said they would not be 2-way interactive, it is just Time Warner's way of telling you what functionality you will lose with a CableCARD vs a set top box. Nothing about that is specific to the Tivo. It is the same for every CableCARD device.
Two-way CableCARDs are coming, but are not currently avaialable. Time Warner can not support 2-way interactive features in any CableCARD device.
Posted at 6:05PM on Aug 24th 2006 by David