Digital Home Thoughts: Is Cablecard Really Dead?

"For years, industry pundits have claimed that Cablecard is dead. Cablecard, which enables consumers to get local and premium HD cable television programming directly into TV's and Media Center PC's via a digital cable tuner. It seemed poised to unlock consumers from the underpowered, much maligned cable boxes many rent from their cable provider and often loathe today. Yet the reality is there are only 443k 3rd party Cablecard devices in service (4 of those in my own house) and it's clear the situation is going to get worse before it gets better."

With two young boys in the house the inability to use video on demand was always a show stopper for me, but I hope that the new Tru2way cards get rolled out in a big way. Competition would do wonders to improve the user experience, but for now the only viable alternative seems to be Tivo. Unfortunately, the cost of two Cablecards and the Tivo monthly fee makes the per TV price twice as much, and that doesn't even include the price of the hardware. It would be wonderful to be able to stroll into the local Best Buy and have as many choices for set top boxes as there are for cellphones, wireless routers, cameras, and just about every other technology that is subject to some competition.

The current Comcast offerings might have been OK before HD, but the 20 hour recording limit for HD programs doesn't give you a lot of room to work with. The occasional 30 second pause after a button push doesn't add to the user experience either. The 6 tuner card mentioned in the article sounds like the start of an awesome media server, but it will need lots of other hardware to complete the experience. It would be great to be able to record everything on one server and then watch it on any TV around the house. Comcast doesn't even allow you to watch programs recorded on a DVR on any other TV. Fios does allow this, but will charge you more for this feature. Let's hope that Tru2way catches on, so that at this time next year we can all have a couple terabytes of disk space on our 6 tuner servers recording anything and everything we want to watch.