The content providers and MSOs want to implement their own look-and-feel for VOD and PPV–this is independent of the built-in EPG UIs for “resident applications” like SARA, Passport and Moxi. These menus are, in part, advertisement for the services and the presentation counts; they certainly don’t want to leave it up to the CE OEMs. They also want to be able to offer other services through the boxes, which is something that they need OCAP to do. If forcing CableCARD on the providers takes that capability away from them, it arguably constitutes restraint of trade. Eventually all of their leased STBs will be CableCARD-based, by FCC regulations.

One of the issues being argued is that OCAP requirement. The cable companies want it, the CE vendors hate it. That, and other disagreements, are holding up CC 2.0. CE vendors really don’t want OCAP, because they want to provide their own interfaces and functionality to access the features, not have every box have the same cable company interface. CE vendors want a standardized way to access the functionality – standard APIs, data formats, etc, instead. That would allow them to integrate the functionality into their product seamlessly instead of having to hand control over to a cable OCAP UI which will almost certainly be inferior, and definitely won’t be integrated into the rest of the product experience.

Personally I think OCAP is a really poor idea and standardized APIs and formats is superior. Allow vendors to differentiate their products and provide different UIs while using the same data and accessing the same functionality. Cable UIs have always been terrible.

I suppose that TiVo could launch without this support so long as they could be sure that they could implement support for it with a firmware push