I’d be happy to get back the channels I lost (and still am paying for, of course), but I won’t hold my breath that I’ll see one of these in the next year.

My take on one-way was to snuff it out in its infancy with “buy-outs” when CC deployments were a couple hundred thousand and CC DVRs were a few thousand. Plus the FCC would have to bang heads on two-way.

But the TR isn´t all that bad. UDCPs (TiVoes anyway) will get all the services they expected when people bought them…which is as much as you can reasonably expect.

How much signal degradation is involved could be a problem. Seems digital tends to be MORE sensitive than analog – more people on the edge of not getting a clear enough signal for digital; No?

In the end, will this TR effort cost cable more or less than drowning the one-way puppy? There was talk of the TR being provided free back around when it was announced.

There´s probably an interesting story in all this for some ambitious blogger to get semi-famous on…how this became so fast tracked, and how cable got so on board…what was the backroom pressure…

There is plenty of blame to go around – the FCC, the cable MSOs, and the consumer electronics industry all have their share. The FCC took a soft stance which allowed the cable industry to follow the letter of the law and not the spirit, and they also kept issuing extensions and waivers that has allowed the cable industry to delay CableCARD and OCAP/tru2way deployments.

The cable industry has taken the path of least expense to comply with the FCC rulings. They want to do as little as possible to alter their infrastructure – that’s why they insist on OCAP/tru2way. Instead of replacing the myriad of different head end systems, OCAP acts as a kind of middle-layer that allows standardized applications to talk to the different back ends. But that puts the onus on the client devices.

Which brings us to the CE industry. They would prefer a lightweight solution and to push all the work onto the cable MSOs. They’ve fought OCAP with their DCR+ counter-proposal, which would require MSOs to standardize their head ends so CE clients can use lightweight protocols. And the CE industry is the reason we have uni-directional devices – the cable industry wanted to go right to two-way with OCAP, but the CE industry insisted on deploying something faster and that became DCR which is uni-directional.

So, OK, I can understand the push to get DCR on the market fast, but that’s put us where we are today – with SDV causing problems, lack of support for VOD & PPV, etc.

And development of two-way support was delayed because both sides – cable and CE – dug in their heels and were unwilling to compromise. Cable insisted on OCAP with no compromise, CE insisted on DCR+ and refused to support OCAP – and that stalemate lasted several years. Meanwhile the FCC just sat on their thumbs instead of knocking some heads together and setting hard deadlines to force a compromise.

It has been giant stare-down, and it looks like the CE camp blinked first. Several TV and STB makers have announced plans to release tru2way-enabled TVs and STBs, breaking away from the larger CE camp that has insisted on DCR+.

But the cable industry gave some ground as well. It started out that a box would be OCAP or native, and never the twain shall meet. If the box was running as OCAP it would download the MSO’s OCAP applications and use them for everything. And this is what the CE vendors objected to. TV vendors have less to lose because most TVs don’t have any native OS anyway. So supporting tru2way is actually an enhancement. But vendors such as TiVo, who have a lot invested in their custom OS/UI, were not about to abdicate control to the MSO. If they did that, why bother buying a TiVo in the first place? You may as well use the cable DVR since you’d have the same UI.

But the cable industry softened their stance to allow hybrid operation, where a box will use the native OS/UI for ‘linear’ content – basically what a TiVo can access today, plus SDV. But for ‘premium’ content like VOD, PPV, etc, it will invoke the cable MSO’s OCAP application.

I’m not happy with the current situation, but you can’t turn back time and we’re stuck with the established infrastructure. The Tuning Resolver is the best, and really the ONLY, possible solution for SDV on a UDCP device. And way back when the S3 first came out speculation on exactly this kind of thing – some kind of adapter – started immediately. So it isn’t any surprise for many of us that it is what it came down to.

Going forward I think the native/OCAP hybrid is the best solution we can hope for as a compromise. It isn’t the most elegant solution, but I think it is the best we’ll get out of all the involved parties, and it sounds like it will provide all the functionality so in the end that’s good enough.

While it is *possible* we’ll see Tru2Way support in the current TiVo S3 or HD using the Tuning Resolver and new software, I tend to doubt it. I’m not sure the current hardware has the brawn to run OCAP applications. And we know TiVo is working on a next-generation box for the hybrid mode, so that will probably be the only way to get the full Tru2Way support. Personally I don’t think that’s too big a deal, even before getting TiVo I really never used VOD, and now with TiVo I find even less of a need since I can grab so much standard content. In my area SDV isn’t in use either.

And that’s another issue I’ve covered in the past. SDV isn’t the only option for cable MSOs. Some of the options they have to carry more channels:
1. Drop analog channels to free slots for digital SD & HD.
2. Update old 550/650/750MHz cable systems to 860MHz or 1GHz to add more usable frequencies.
3. Start using advanced codecs like H.264 instead of MPEG-2.
4. Use SDV.

3 & 4 are both problems for most CableCARD devices, since most of them are MPEG-2 only and UDCP. 1 is the low cost option, but it can be a PR issue as people complain about losing content or needing to get a cable box to keep their channels. 2 is a good idea in general as it will help even those MSOs who implement SDV – raw capacity is always the ultimate limiting factor. But it is expensive as it can mean replacing the head end, repeaters, local distribution systems, and STBs. Oh, and I suppose 5 is taking the infrastructure to the next level with steps like Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) which can offer extreme bandwidth levels – FiOS is FTTH for example.

In the end CableCARD is a bump in the road. The next step is DCAS – Downloadable Conditional Access System – which would do away with the requirement for physical cards completely. With the delays to CableCARD the cable industry tried to get the FCC to just skip CC and go right to DCAS, but it would’ve delayed adoption several years as DCAS isn’t ready to go. But that is the direction things are heading over time. No one likes the cards.

Basically the consumer has been trampled as the cable industry and the CE industry have been pushing and shoving each other. Meanwhile the FCC has been failing to referee the fight, content to just let the two parties slug it out no matter the collateral damage. So while I think there were better ways to handle the issue, in the end I’m glad to see compromises being reached because it means we’re more likely to actually receive products.

Sorry this is a little disjointed – it is 3AM Saturday and I’ve been awake since mid-day Thursday.

EDIT: UGH, I had a few stupid mistakes. Now that I’ve slept I fixed them.

I believe that the cable companies are forced rent the CableCARDS at a low cost.
Will they be getting their profit margin back with the TR?

Do you agree? Whose fault do you think it is? Are you happy with the current compromise? Will CableCards vanish from TVs anyway? What about Tru2Way? Think we’ll all have to throw out our current Tivos to get it? Should we care? Will it suck?

I’d love to hear you weigh in on the issue more…

Now I guess someone has to poke TiVo into saying what they did at the Interop and what their date for software release is…

Dave…Mega…??????

P.S. To those bitchin´´bout SDV…it is vastly more important than the one-way device scene.