Too little, too late, too difficult, too expensive
Companies and industries that do not embrace change often come to regret that decision. This is a story of how American cable TV companies failed with CableCARD. They delayed complying with an FCC mandate, consistent with Section 629 of the 1996 telecommunications law, to "…assure the commercial availability to consumers… of converter boxes… from manufacturers, retailers, and other vendors not affiliated with… [the] programming distributor."
The consequence to cable companies is declining market share as alternative technologies replace the cable TV subscription model.
CableCARD was their response to the 1996 law. CableLabs, an industry group, developed the CableCARD to allow consumers to buy rather than rent set top boxes. Cable companies were slow to deploy them; probably, rightly fearing that they would lose rental fees for boxes and remotes.
The only two devices I know that work with CableCARDs are newer TiVos and Windows computers with OCUR digital cable tuners. Using CableCARDs requires paying for an installer visit and a modest monthly fee. I pay $4/mo. for 2 CableCARDs in my TiVo. Renting a Cablevision DVR would cost me about $20/mo. That DVR is a weak approximation of TiVo.
Computers make wonderful DVRs. Microsoft has offered the Media Center application since 2002. It comes in Vista Home Premium and most versions of Windows 7. Media Center, along with commercial and free open source alternatives, works great as a DVR. It requires one or more CableCARDs to display cable TV encrypted digital feeds and premium channels. The OCUR tuner made this possible.
OCUR was hobbled by CableLabs. They required that they certify the computer if it included an OCUR. I once read that they charge the PC makers $10,000 per model for this "service". Only AMD made OCUR tuners. HP, Dell and some niche computer makers offered these as additions to a few models. Adding to the difficulty, if you didn’t buy the OCUR(s) at the time you bought the PC you could not add them later.
Not surprisingly, OCUR-enabled PCs were a minuscule percent of PC sales. I believe that HP and Dell no longer offer OCUR provisioned PCs and that AMD has exited the business. At the recent CEDIA meeting Microsoft announced that we will be able to buy OCUR tuners to install into our existing PCs sometime in the future. Hauppauge and Ceton announced they will make add-on OCUR tuners for sale next year.
We have many alternatives to cable TV, satellite TV or broadcast TV today. Some are disc-based, most are Internet-based. Netflix, Redbox, and many town libraries make it simple to borrow a DVD at low or no cost. Amazon’s Video On Demand, the iTunes store, Vudu and Roku boxes, websites like Hulu.com, CBS.com and many others compete with traditional cable TV.
I wanted to promote and install PCs with OCUR tuners and CableCARDs for my customers, beginning in 2006, if it had been easy and affordable. I did not because CableLabs made it too difficult and too expensive. I explored and found alternatives to Cable TV. My clients and my family watch video on our computers hooked to our HDTVs, just not cable TV. Computer-based alternatives to cable TV have been multiplying like rabbits. It is hard to keep up.
My 16 year-old daughter rarely watches cable TV. She likes the flexibility that watching video on her computer offers. She can have her messaging apps open and pause the video to talk with her friends. She is typical of her generation.
Cable companies should have embraced consumers owning their own set top boxes rather than resisting. They will soon regret that decision as more and more customers abandon cable TV for the cheaper, easier and more satisfying alternatives.
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I wholeheartedly agree. They had the chance to bridge the gap between analog cable and Internet video and have miserably failed.
I will hold on to cable (FiOS TV) for now, because I’m a sucker for an HD picture and surround sound and online video isn’t quite there yet. I hope that Windows 7 will truly offer the integrated CableCard experience that Vista failed at, which may keep me with cable for longer. But that remains to be seen.
There were and are other devices than TiVo set-top boxes with CableCARD slots. The first wave, earlier this decade featured several TVs and even some Sony DVRs. It pretty much died, no one knew about it including the cable companies. Last year, the newest wave began – CableCARD devices designed to work on tru2way cable networks. That retail initiative may ultimately die too, though many are hoping it’ll hit its stride next year.
Some clarification… CableLabs IS the cable industry and the push for separable security to open the market came from the FCC. It did take a long while, but I don’t know how intentionally it was on the side of the cable companies – it’s just a massive infrastructure overhaul and new technology. It hasn’t worked out probably how they intended and has been complicated by SDV, which allows cable operators to better manage their bandwidth, but for a long time also resulted in lost channels for TiVo customers until that SDV Tuning Adapters (a hack) finally made it to market.
As bad as it is, it’s still better than satellite TV providers and a purely IP play like U-Verse which aren’t held to the same open standard. You MUST use their devices.
Generally agree. I think cablecard is on a slow march to death, and with it will go tru2way which is also wheezing pretty bad now after missing the deadline the cable cos agreed to in their deal with Sony. Which means the next generation of “cable ready” TVs will die once again, and people who might have liked Video On Demand services from their cable cos will instead use services like Hulu, ABC.com, ESPN360.com, etc etc to get their over the top fix. If the cable companies have any chance of stopping this flood I’d say its with the TV Anywhere initiative which MIGHT allow you to watch VOD for any channels you pay for over the internet. Perhaps only from your home (hey, its better than nothing) but maybe even from a Hotel room. If they do this right and get it out there quick enough they’ve got a shot. My guess is they’ll either take too long or screw it up or more likely both. And the flood will overtop their barriers, and that will in the long run be the end of them. They just don’t know it yet.