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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.
TiVo's set-top Series3 and TiVoHD both work with CableCARDs. Why not use one of them?
(Yeah, yeah, I realize that the TiVo service subscription will put off people, but it's worth it.)
the cell phone companies. There's no real techincal reason that we can't have cool, open OSes for our phones. They just want to lock us in so that we have to buy their stupid wallpaper, ring tones, etc.
Is why can't we buy tuner cards with CABLECARD support?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
It really is inexcusable that there is no way for me to get HDTV into my HTPC without using a goddamn OTA card with a big antenna on the roof.
Each card has a public and private key. The cable company's signal is also encrypted, but there's a public band somewhere where the cable company can communicate will any cablecard that happens to be listening. So you plug the cable card into the TV (or tivo or whatever) and then go to the setup menu and read off a string of numbers. That string represents the card's public key.
The cable company takes its encryption key and encrypts it with the card's public key, then transmits that over the public band. Every cable card device sees this, but only the target card (your card) is able to read it, and use the card's private key to decrypt it.
So now the card has been given the cable company's encryption key, and can decrypt the signal and let you watch all the sweet sweet porn.^H^H^H^H^H discovery HD. The cable company periodically changes its key, and it keeps a list of all the cable cards that are authorized and sends the new key to all those cards.
IF you had all of this working in software, then you could copy the cable company's key into as many other devices as you want. That way, you could pay for one TV, but have other TVs authorized. But, you would have to keep copying the key to all the other devices. You absolutely could not get perpetual free cable. The best you can do is pay for one but actually have many. Hardly even seems worth it.
[Note, I left this same reply on TFA's comments but thought I'd copy it here cuz slashdot is cooler.]
This reminds me of a deadline a few years ago set by the FCC to include working firewire ports on set-top boxes. This would allow a digital connection to certain TV's as well as to recorders like D-VHS or computers (using D-VHS emulators.)
http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/02/01/does-your-cable-box-have-a-firewire-port
That mandate deadline came and passed without compliance as well. Boxes never had ports, or had ports removed even though OEM's like SA and Moto included them, or had ports that weren't functional.
The FCC has been a joke since it was created. Like most of government, despite any good intentions, it has proved ineffectual in enforcing many of its own mandates that has resulted in loss to the consumers while effectively enforcing protections for certain corporations like the Cable Cos resulting in loss to competition.
For me, I've given up. I've basically voted with my feet and stopped subscribing to cable. If I hear about something of interest, I can usually download it or have a friend record it or wait for it on DVD and rent it. The result is that I watch less TV, which may be a good thing or maybe I miss things I would enjoy or maybe it doesn't make a real difference except that the Cable Cos, as well as the content creators, advertisers other related businesses and the FCC (through included taxes), are not getting my money because of this stupidity. You may want to consider the same.
CableCard is expensive to deploy and difficult to do correctly, as many consumers have had problems and the finger pointing between the Consumer Electronics companies and the cable companies continues. Couple that with fragmentation on emerging standards (e.g. unidirectional multi-stream cable card vs. bidirectional M-card and its head-end equipment implications) and you can see that this is a huge problem.
The real path in digital cable is ClearQAM (i.e. unencrypted digital cable) that will eventually transition to DCAS, with CableCard being the lame horse in the race. The Downloadable Conditional Access System (DCAS) is better to the cable companies because:
1. They don't have to deal with any kind of external hardware in terms of inventories and so on.
2. Nobody from the cable company needs to go and activate the hardware (i.e. tens of billions in deployment costs for personnel, vehicles and equipment), because it's all done from the head end.
3. The Conditional Access system is inherently downloadable, meaning it can be renewed if cracked (similar to BD+ on Blu-Ray).
4. The Conditional Access system is embedded inside the chip with special design methods that prevent it from being hacked from the outside. Before you go off on me on this one, note that it's part of the contract when you license the IP that the hardware has a very specific path to transfer information that can't be addressed by additional logic and subjects you to an economic death penalty if you do - no more peeking into internal registers or external memory since all of that has to be encrypted from the inside and done so by design from the beginning.
5. Even if you do go to the extent of de-lidding the chip and attempting to find the secrets, the cable companies can send electronic bullets to disable a cracked device if so found.
6. Content recording and sharing is automatically DRM protected from the head-end's instructions, so only compliant devices within a particular approved secure media sharing framework can transfer the content.
It's a content producer's and cable company's simultaneous wet dream. The cable guys are interested ultimately in selling gravy (i.e. programming), not leasing or selling hardware that needs to be maintained, stocked, etc.. Even the satellite guys that I've talked to have said as much. When you also consider that Broadcom, the very dominant player in Set Top Box chips, is itself pushing DCAS, you can see where this is going. Heck, even Verizon last year tried to throw a monkey wrench in the works by writing a letter to the FCC so it could use DCAS for its new Fiber-to-the-Premises IPTV network. The poor bastards who get the shaft now are the companies providing digital TV chips with cable box functionality embedded, although this is also why Broadcom is intent on pushing this through as a first-mover advantage in the DTV chip market.
Don't fret too much on this one - it's all already essentially been decided for you. The unfortunate aspect of this is that the early adopters are going to get the shaft.