Last week I mentioned the Samsung TV with full two-way digital cable support. Samsung has more tricks up its sleeve, if this tidbit from This Week in Consumer Electronics is accurate:
Samsung unveiled at a Christmas in August press event, here, a Home Media Center set-top box which integrates bidirectional digital cable reception, standard and high definition digital video recording, music and image playback, voice over IP cable telephony functions, and broadband cable modem service.
The Home Media Center is based on Digeo’s Moxi menu interface software and X-Stream x86 processor. The first iteration of the Home Media Center will be distributed on a lease basis through cable partners, but Samsung is hoping to have a retail version of the device as early as late 2006, after dual-tuner capability has been enabled for bidirectional CableCARD devices.
The enabling hardware is indeed on the way. It’s not here yet.
It’s frustrating to see these proprietary solutions appear while more open and extensible products like Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 still can only do over-the-air HDTV. This is enormously frustrating to people like Thomas Hawk, who recently said: “If DirecTV and TiVo can make a deal to get us an HDTV PVR surely Microsoft can as well.”
Well, no. TiVo cut a deal with DirecTV to supply DirecTV customers with a box and a back-end service. DirecTV owns the customers and in fact is about to cut TiVo off at the knees with its own box. The box is completely closed and I can’t get the content off it except via an analog port. If I cancel my DirecTV service and take my HD DirecTiVo to the cable company, it will be useless.
Likewise, I can get an HD DVR from my cable company. Scientific Atlanta and Motorola make them, but here too I can only rent them through my cable company. If I move, I have to give back the box, which would probably be worthless at my new home anyway. Scientific Atlanta and Motorola won’t sell me a box directly. Even if they could, what good would it be?
Sony and Matsushita already have CableCARD-compatible DVRs. (I wrote about the Sony model in this post last June.) I spent an hour or so yesterday reading through posts about the single-tuner, one-way Sony DHG-HDD500 DVR in one very long thread at AVS Forum. What I read didn’t make me want to run out and drop a thousand bucks on one. Especially when Comcast would give me a dual-tuner HD-compatible DVR for free.
It’s wishful thinking to say that Microsoft can cut separate deals with individual cable companies. That won’t work for two reasons. First, it will piss off customers. How would you feel if you’re in an area served by Cox or Adelphia, and you buy a Media Center PC only to find out that the promised HD recording works only with Comcast and isn’t available in your area? And second, even if individual cable companies wanted to cut their own deals, they don’t have the technology. The reason CableLabs exists is so that cable companies can count on a supply of standard gear for the head end and the set top.
HD recording from cable won’t happen until the companies that make TV tuner cards for Media Center to get a device certified that can handle at least one and preferably two CableCARDs. So what about it, Hauppauge, and AVerMedia and ATI and all the other companies on the Logo Partner List? Have you got these products in the pipeline? Have they been submitted for CableLabs testing? When will we see them on the market? Are you waiting for Windows Vista? If you’ve got any inside information you want to share anonymously, drop me a note: ed-blog AT bott DOT com.
12 comments ↓
Ed: There is already hardware out there that could ship to allow you to stick a CableCARD into the PC. This hardware changes very little from the hardware shipping today in CableCARD devices. Many devices with CableCARD support run embedded Linux solutions. The CableCARD itself it just a PCMCIA card. Getting the hardware itself to the desktop PC should be very simple.
What’s not there is the interface with the software to allow it to work, to allow CableLabs to give the Okay. Hardware support or not, drop the raw content on a user accessible bus and watch CableLabs shoot it down time and time again when testing.
BTW, without basic hardware support (meaning the interface hardware exists now in some form or fashion) CableLabs could not have tested anything, Microsoft could not have submitted anything for them to test either.
Chris
Chris, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. “There is already hardware out there that could ship to allow you to stick a CableCARD into the PC.” Well, yes, I suppose that’s true in the sense that there are CableCARD slots and decoders and so on. But as you note, CableLabs tests specific implementations of hardware. The companies that design tuner cards would have to submit a PCI-based CableCARD device with some drivers to go in a PC that could run a compatible operating system.
There is already a mechanism for this to happen in the CHILA agreement. (I wrote about it in the June 21 post linked in the article above.) If you have any details about specific product plans from hardware companies, I’d love to know about them.
You are correct CableLabs does indeed test hardware, but you’re not looking at it correctly. The CableCARD reader might make up the “physical” hardware, but hardware also implies software (hardware+software=the product). When you submit a product for testing (say a TiVo), you can’t just submit the CableCARD interface with the box (the hardware). You have to submit the product as a whole, the box, the hardware (product).
Shuttle showed off a PC with a CableCARD slot at CES. There is for sure a reference design out there, but shipping the hardware doesn’t bring you any closer to CableCARD in Media Center. That shipping hardware is the least of the problems for now.
Chris
Dual (or more) tuners hopefully won’t require multiple CableCARDs. The key feature of the CableCARD is the decoding of the encrypted stream based on your account number and the hardware key in the actual card. I am hopeful that since TiVo figured out a way to deal with multiple streams and a single decryption source as have the dual tuner cable DVR companies that Microsoft will do the same on MCE. The main drawback to multiple CableCARDs would be payment. I am sure the cable companies would charge an extra device rental per card so it would be like paying for 2 (or more) TV’s when really it is only one. The ideal situation is to decouple the decyption (and 2 way communication in the future) from the tuners. However in reality it will most likely be a PCI card with a PCMCIA slot built into the back.
I have a self-built MCE box basically sitting idle until CableCard’s are fully integrated. It didn’t take me long to get tired of slow and clumsy IR blaster’s, being forced to feed only s-video from cable box to MCE tuner, and not being able to watch the cable HD channels.
Once all of this can be processed thru in one machine, the concept of an MCE based DVR will be able to take off.
Wow, interesting. Regardless of what needs to happen, it needs to happen quickly. We’re deploying MCE and Extenders throughout the house and the IR blaster solution is not that appealing. There’s no reason Microsoft can’t get things done, they do have their ways of getting other companies to comply.
@ Brian: I believe v2 of CableCards will allow for 5 simultaneous streams of digital TV.
@Matthew
Update: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-16CableLabsPR.mspx
YAY! I hope it’s sooner than holiday 06 tho.
@Matthew
The release says those will only be one-way CableCARDs. But it’s a start.
I just picked up a Panasonic 500U plasma. I’m a ReplayTV fan but I thought for sure Windows Media Centers would have had a cable card “work around”. I’m looking forward to next christmass already.
I don’t miss the channel guide, but the wife sure does.
ATI Occur CableCard interface for Microsoft Vista(Media Center) Of course there should be no reason this shouldn’t be made to work with other systems if ATI OEMs it.
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2662
Where can I purchase a cablecard reader (housed in a small box OK), plug it into an electircal outlet (if power necessary), attach it by coaxial cable to my HDTV cable terminal, call the cable company to install the card, and then watch the HDTV to which I’m already subsribed on my family cable package? In other words, all I seek to do is to retrofit to the position I would have been in had I purchased a cable ready HDTV. Can’t the slot exist outside of the TV set? If this product d/n exist, perhaps somebody ought to develop it. There must be many of us who own a HDTV w/o the slot who have no desire for interaction with the cable company through the STB.
Steve Davis
914-949-0661
i would like to purchase a cable card reader my self. if one exists i have been serching and cant find one, if i knew about the cable card slot on the T.V.s i would have purchased one with a slot.i can`t stand using the stb would rather have not have one.
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