Alan Stafford has an informative article up on the PC World staff blog about the state of the CableCard.
To recap, "CableCard is the technology created by the United States cable television industry in response to government mandates by the FCC to separate the internal functions of integrated set-top boxes and allow third-party manufacturers to sell devices with built-in digital cable tuners directly to consumers." I couldn't sum it up any better myself, so I took it straight from the Wikipedia entry.
As of now, and not counting television sets that are CableCard ready, the recently released Series3 TiVo is the only third-party device with built-in cable card support. [Update: The Sony DHG-HDD250 and 500 released 12/31/04 use CableCard as well - Thanks Nick and Dave]
Alan headed out to CEDIA in an effort to see how manufacturers and consumers are responding to the entire CableCard situation, and determined that interest is less than stellar for a few reasons:
- Consumers are either unaware or not all that interested in the technology
- It costs $300 to build CableCard support into televisions. It should be 30-60% lower before consumers will be willing to jump on board
- Cable companies lose revenue streams if consumers use this generation of CableCards, thus cable companies are making it difficult for consumers to get them
- CableCards are currently one-way devices and some consumers are unwilling to part with On-demand and Pay-per-view programming one-way CableCards fail to accomodate
I'm personally a bit on the fence with the entire CableCard issue. Although, I like the idea of not being forced into whatever set-top-box my cable company happens to be peddling that quarter, I'm also underwhelmed by what the technology currently has to offer.
While the promise of simplifying my entertainment system by utilizing a Series3 TiVo and cheaper-to-rent CableCards is alluring, I'm entirely unprepared to part with HBO on Demand when I need to go on a marathon catch-up-on-Entourage session.
Sure I could just TiVo the series, but things come up. The power goes out, the wife accidentally deletes them, a hard drive crashes - or whatever - I prefer having the ability to watch the shows at my leisure via On-demand instead of not. It also goes without saying that I can't spare selling the plasma required to purchase a Series3, so I have no use for CableCards at the moment.
Unless a Series3 falls in my lap, I'm probably going to wait until a more concrete path is paved for CableCards, for more third-party devices to support them, and for the wrinkles to be ironed out of two-way CableCard technology.
How do you guys feel about CableCards? Have you had any issue receiving them from your cable provider? Better yet, have you even found a reason to request them? Does the lack of solid information on CableCards' future have you waiting to see how things unfold, or are you pretty much indifferent to the entire CableCard affair?
Click here for a different point of view from staff blogger Brad Linder.
1. I don't understand why you are stating that the TiVo 3 is the only 3rd Party device with built-in CableCard. My Samsung 42" DLP TV (HL-R4266W) has a CableCard slot. And I've had the TV for nearly a year. Would that be considered a 3rd Party device?
Posted at 3:24PM on Sep 15th 2006 by Nick Burns