Joe – True, the TiVo HD has pretty much all of the components needed to be a Profile 2.0 Blu-ray Player – except the drive. But they’d also need the software. Since BD-J is based on the same platform as OCAP, there could be some synergy there. But I wouldn’t count on this ever happening.

Tom – They’re related but not the same thing. CableCARD is an access token. The cards enable decryption of encrypted channels, as well as access to some of the data services like handling channel mapping. OCAP, aka Tru2Way, is a Java-based software platform. The idea is that OCAP provides a standardized API for software applications to access the underlying hardware. For example, TiVo’s OCAP software which will, theoretically, eventually be able to run on any OCAP-compliant STB. (OCAP is still in early days right now and the whole ‘universal’ aspect isn’t quite there yet. Software still needs some tweaks to work on different platforms, but it’ll get there.) So you’d still need the CableCARD to work as the access token, while you’d need OCAP to host the software that handles the UI for PPV, VOD, etc.

Tivodog – I wouldn’t hold your breath. They’d have to beef up pretty much the entire system to allow it to sustain gigabit speed transfers. The current system doesn’t max out 100Mbps – the Ethernet interface is not the bottleneck. Also, the Ethernet controller is part of the CPU. Most SoCs for consumer electronics still seem to be 100Mbps, you don’t see GigE much. If the chips aren’t there, TiVo won’t be doing it. And I don’t see them devolving back to using discrete chipsets because of the increased cost. The whole evolution of the platform has been toward integrated chips. We’ll see GigE when Broadcom, or the like, produces an affordable SoC which incorporates it. And, looking through their product sheets, it doesn’t look like Broadcom has GigE on their SoCs, all the ones with Ethernet that I found are 10/100.

Hepp – Yeah, the Tuning Resolver is still coming for the S3 and HD. 2Q08 is still the expected time frame, probably close to mid-year.

Sully – That’s possible, but the standalone boxes have a LOT more features than the cable OCAP software. Plus the current OCAP software is designed to work on boxes with constant data connections, so they actually rely on head-end servers for some of their functions – a lot more than the standalone boxes do. That’s fine when the cable company is deploying them and providing the head end, but might not work so well for consumer products. It is possible, but it would probably take longer to bring the OCAP code base up to feature parity with the standalone code than to add OCAP support to the standalone code.

Jack – No real idea. My most optimistic would be late this year, but I don’t think that’s realistic. It is probably more likely that we’ll see something at CES 2009 in January and the box will come out sometime next year.

Once the SA’s are running OCAP – why not run the whole OS in OCAP? Doesn’t it seem that the Comcast port leads the way for a completely OCAP-based solution?

Past comment link.

Anyways, the development team better not poop the bed this time around!!

EDIT: I edited this to fix the broken link to the old comment. Note you can use HTML links in comments. -MZ

Since the cable cos. have never liked the cards, I wonder if this is a way to get 3rd party STB manufacturers to drop support for it.

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