Yesterday, we took a look back at 2006 and concluded high definition reaching a critical mass was the story of the year. For 2007, instead of forecasting the obvious (everyone gets HDTV – for less, digital media is everywhere) or making a bunch of wild predictions (Comcast buys TiVo), Dave and I wanted to focus on two notable dates.
Seven-Oh-Seven
Cable Companies and CableCARD – Once Upon a Time
The difficult thing about making set-tops has traditionally been the embedded security features, called Conditional Access (CA). Two companies – Motorola and Scientific Atlanta – cornered the market on CA, and thus became the primary set-top manufacturers for cable operators large and small. The operators decided they wanted more vendor choices and so supported the idea of separating CA from set-top hardware. Separable security, i.e. the CableCARD was born.
CE Manufacturers and CableCARD
Consumer electronic companies want in on the cable broadband riches. If operators have to provide a CableCARD to enable security, then CE companies of all kinds (not just set-top manufacturers) can make products that plug in to the cable distribution network. The CE industry supports CableCARD.
The FCC and CableCARD
Competition = Good. The FCC supports CableCARD.
The CableCARD Fight Today
While cable companies like the idea of the CableCARD, they’ve discovered that it’s expensive to implement, and they’re the ones picking up the tab. To avoid the expense, operators have decided they’d like to skip right over CableCARD and go to a Downloadable Conditional Access System (DCAS). Many agree that DCAS would be wonderful and presumably cheaper, but, despite the fact that the technology has been demonstrated, it’s not yet ready for primetime. Cable operators have petitioned and won deadline extensions from the FCC, but now they’re running out of delay time. Unless a new ruling is passed down from the FCC, cable operators will have to stop shipping any set-tops that don’t support CableCARD by July 1st. The clock is ticking.
So what does all this mean? Without going into the technical limitations of CableCARD, it means cable companies are probably going to be spending more moola on new set-tops in the near-term. Expect to see some of these new set-tops at CES next week. And coming soon to a home near you.