CableCards, now they are something that the cable companies would love to bury. The FCC has ruled time over that cable companies must provide CableCards for use in third party devices.Cable companies don't like cable cards for two reasons; firstly they would much prefer you to use their own hardware and not someone else's. Secondly supporting the 524 CableCard product models is proving difficult for them, or at least so they say.
According to a recent article on Arstechnica there are only 200,000 CableCards across the US compared to the 73 million cable subscribers. That means approx. 0.2% of cable subscribers use a CableCard.
You can see why cable companies might be so pissed off having to constantly battle with the FCC and support an ever growing number of CableCard products for just 0.2% of their customers.
Cable companies have stated they would prefer to use a software based method which is done automatically, but since this is not ready yet they are stuck with CableCards.
With the high number of viewing problems occurring with CableCards and cable companies often being stubborn to help out it is frequently leaving companies like TiVo in the lurch.
One of the reasons we had to wait so long for the Series 3 was because of issues over CableCards. Even now, after the Series 3 has been released, serious problems getting cable companies to install CableCards are being reported.
Recent CableCard Articles on PVRWire:
1. Yes, but those problems are due to very cheap, poor quality Cablecards and the refusal of many techs to actally follow Tivo instructions on how to install said Cablecards and authorize them properly.
Cablecards produced in 2005-2006 seem to work fine, the ones from 2004 are shoddy.
Posted at 10:20AM on Oct 3rd 2006 by L'Emmereur