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Why Can't I Buy A CableCARD Ready Set-Top Box?
Al E Usse writes "Ars Technica does a write up of the problems that were not solved by the July 1, 2007 integration ban on integrated security in your cable box. The goal was to get everyone on the same page by requiring standardized technology. Just the same, the cable companies aren't really playing ball. 'The companies who make the boxes don't seem interested in selling to consumers [and] cable companies still push their own branded devices.' The article covers some deep background on the whole CableCARD mess, and concludes with the current state of the market: 'Based on June 2007 figures from the cable industry, 271,000 CableCARDs have been deployed. That's an astonishingly low number. 58 percent of all US households with a TV subscribe to cable, according to the NCTA, which means that 65 million households have at least basic cable.'"
I'm the inventory coordinator for a cable company. All of our new DVRs and Digital boxes run off of cable cards. If I pop open the card cover, inside is the exact same cable card we give customers. It's even handy when we want to test a new box, we just use an already addressed card instead of addressing a whole new box. It isn't cableCard technology that's the problem. It works with our system just fine. The problem happens to be crappy STBs that don't conform to CC specifications. Motorola, Cisco, and MS all make boxes that work just fine on our system with our on-demand and and program guide. Now, whether they have better access to documentation from Cable Labs, I'll never know. But it's BS that it's somehow the technology's fault.