After probably feeling some heat online in the last week or so (here and here for example), the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) rounded up a bunch of journalists (mainstream press and bloggers) for a conference call today. They presented a bit of CableCARD history in how we got here (SDV) and where we’re going with tru2way, followed by a Q&A session. Obviously, the perspective presented is their own and may not line up exactly with the how the CEA, FCC, or an educated consumer might present it.
No new details on the SDV Tuning Resolver were provided, though TiVo was mentioned quite a few times as being involved in the process. And they’re still shooting for Q2 delivery… though, we shall see. I suspect at least three manufacturers will provide the adapter later this year, and we already know Motorola’s solution will be on display with TiVo next month at The Cable Show:
Motorola will demonstrate its MTR700 Tuning Adapter which connects unidirectional UDCPs (including a TiVo device, in specific) to a cable network, accessing multimedia content in the cable network’s switched digital video (SDV) tier. Seamless tuning of the TiVo device across both broadcast and SDV tiers will be shown.
More of my recent SDV/CableCARD thoughts can be found here and Megazone’s take is also worth checking out.
Interesting call factoid: 380,000 CableCARD deployments. I wonder what (large) percent are TiVo owners… And if we assume most Series3 and THD customers use at least one CableCARDs, perhaps we can extrapolate the number of units out there.
