Digital Home Thoughts: C|NET: Cable Companies Lose Round in CableCard battle

"The cable industry suffered a blow on Friday when a federal appeals court upheld the Federal Communications Commission's mandate requiring cable operators to distribute a technology called CableCards, which will allow digital cable subscribers to get rid of their cable set-top boxes. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously supported the FCC's "integration ban," which requires cable operators to separate encryption functions from basic decoding capabilities in their set-top boxes. Separating these functions allows cable customers to plug their cable line directly into a TV set without the need for a set-top box. The CableCard device is about the size of a thick credit card, and fits into a special slot built into digital TVs and a growing number of consumer electronic devices, such as TiVo's digital video recorder and most HDTV sets."

This article makes it sound like the hold-up with cable cards is the cable companies, but when looking at TVs with a friend last month at a local Best Buy, there was exactly one Sony TV there with cable card support. So to me that means that the problem lies someplace else: the manufacturers of the TVs don't seem to care about cable card support. Am I missing something here? Are there more TVs on the market with cable card support, and I just didn't see them? Or is this a USA/Canada thing where the US market has cable-card TVs and the Canadian market doesn't? That's what's happened with integrated HDTV tuners - TVs in the Canadian market don't have then, but many US-based TVs do.