Ed Bott's Media Central

Digging a little deeper into the Multistream CableCARD Status Report as passed along by Dave Zatz:

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) has provided a CableCARD status report to the Federal Communications Comission. For the most part the association documents the adoption rate, consumer costs, rate of incidents, and other metrics of current CableCARDs amongst the top cable providers. However, the more interesting news is the status of CableCARD 2.0 on track for 2006 deployment.

He quotes from this report filed by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association with the FCC (PDF document):

Pre-Qualified samples of the multistream CableCARD will be submitted to CableLabs for preliminary testing in the fourth quarter of 2005, with the expectation of full testing and qualification early in 2006. It is expected that multistream CableCARDs will be widely available for use in commercially available commercial devices by mid-2006.

If you read between the lines, it’s an interesting chronicle of how foot-dragging and technical complexity (especially the former) are holding back technology.

The last 24 pages of the report, consisting of inventories of CableCARDs in service and the problems associated with them by the six leading cable companies, are especially depressing.

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