We first heard about an OCAP SDK from Motorola last June, but haven’t heard much since then. In the meantime there have been a number of changes, not the least of which has been the rebranding of OCAP as tru2way, as well as a number of CE vendors signing the tru2way MOU with CableLabs. Tru2way really has a lot of traction now and we should see a number of tru2way products on the market by mid-2009.

Well, according to Media Experiences 2 Go Motorola has finally released the SDK to tru2way developers. ME2G has a Q&A with Motorola’s Frank Goddard, and there is a product fact sheet PDF available as well. Tools like this will be a major factor in building a successful tru2way ecosystem.

The Motorola MTR700 and the Cisco STA1520, which we knew were slated for Wave 60 certification testing at the end of June, have both passed, as reported by Multichannel News. With both major vendors’ Tuning Adapters certified, cable MSOs should be able to soon begin offering them to customers soon to support Switched Digital Video (SDV). This is a little bit behind schedule, the Tuning Resolver (as the Tuning Adapter was then known) was expected in 2Q08. But even coming in a few months late it has been an impressively quick development cycle for the cable industry. It is known that Motorola started working on their unit last July, and they were revealed to the public last August. So it has been just about a year from the start of work to certification, which is really not a lot of time to develop, test, and certify a new product.

As recently revealed, the new 9.4 TiVo update includes Tuning Adapter support, so TiVo users will be ready for the TAs as soon as the cable MSOs make them available. As Bright House, Cox, Time Warner, and others all implementing SDV, the TAs will be increasingly important. Pricing for customers is not yet known, except for Cox which announced plans to provide the TAs to their customers free of charge.

EngadgetHD is down at The Cable Show and Ben Drawbaugh (the lucky SOB) got a little hands-on time with the Motorola MTR700 Tuning Adapter for SDV. It seems that CableLabs has decided to start calling such devices ‘Tuning Adapters’ instead of the previous ‘Tuning Resolver’. (I prefer Tuning Resolver, such is life.) The MTR700 was named before the change, which makes me wonder if they’ll rename it the MTA700 before release.

As we’ve known for a while, the Motorola TA looks just like their DCT700 cable box. It is a very simple device with only five connections - coax in, coax out, USB, a diagnostics port, and power. In the demo it is connected in series with the TiVo HD cable into the MTR700, then out of the TA into the TiVo, and the USB connection to the TiVo. Ben reports that it works perfectly, tuning SDV channels transparently with no apparent delay compared to linear channels. He also says it should be available to cable MSOs in July, as I previously predicted, but no firm details on consumer availability or pricing yet.

All in all it sounds like good news. Maybe Ben can see if Cisco has their STA1520 on display as well.

Wow, in the past couple of days there has been an interesting flurry of online activity about CableCARD, Switched Digital Video (SDV), and the Tuning Resolver. HD GURU posted an ‘investigative report’ entitled “How The Cable Industry Plans to Cheat 10+ Million HDTV Owners”, so you might guess at the tone. Unfortunately, there are a few factual errors in the post - for example, all CableCARDs are two-way capable and always have been. Mike Schwartz from CableLabs responded with an extensive comment that I recommend reading if you read the post. (I’d link to it but the blog doesn’t appear to support comment links, just scroll down a bit.)

The HDTiVo Blog picked it up from there (which is where I found the link to the HD GURU post). Gizmodo also picked up the story, though I have a nit to pick: “Our friend Gary Merson, the HD Guru, has uncovered an issue that may soon piss you off.” Uncovered? Gizmodo hasn’t been paying attention, blogs such as this one, Zatz Not Funny, and others have mentioned the SDV issue and Tuning Resolver repeatedly for quite a while now. Just one example, the issue with Bright House cable pulling channels, and then returning them. This is hardly a surprise issue if you’ve been paying attention. And, unfortunately, Gizmodo repeated the errors from the original post.

Anyway, CableLabs responded to Gizmodo’s original post, and Gizmodo shared the information in a follow-up post. I’m glad a statement came out of it to help clarify things a bit, and correct the misconceptions.

Over at Zatz Not Funny, Dave Zatz chimed in on the SDV Tuning resolver issue as well. Including a link to the most solid, and best, news to come out of the whole thing, at Media Experiences 2 Go. Mari Silbey of Motorola reports that Motorola’s Tuning Resolver implementation, now officially the MTR700, has sailed through CableLabs interoperability testing ‘with flying colors’. The next step is CableLabs certification testing with product submission in April in preparation for the certification board meeting in June. So, presuming the device gets certified, it will be ready at the end of June. Which means it would be very unlikely to make the 2Q2008 release schedule, but will probably be available in early 3Q08. Motorola will be exhibiting the MTR700 at The Cable Show in New Orleans in May. While it may not seem that way to those awaiting a solution, the development of the Tuning Resolver has been extremely fast for a new piece of hardware. The cable industry is really fast-tracking development to get the Tuning Resolver out there as fast as possible. Now it is up to the consumer electronics industry to provide compatible firmware for CableCARD devices with USB ports. (TiVo is, of course, already on board.)

Back in November when the Motorola Tuning Resolver was first revealed, it was noted that it strongly resembled their DCT700 cable box. The MTR700 model number seems to indicate the commonality is more than cosmetic.

I recently posted about the pending shift from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 for cable. Of course, part of that shift would have to be MPEG-4 capable cable set-top boxes. And now, according to MediaExperiences2Go, Motorola is ready to meet that need with the DCX3400 dual-tuner HD DVR, DCX3200 single-tuner HD STB, and DCX100 single-tuner SD STB. They support both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 content, have 1GHz cable tuners to support the latest and greatest cable networks, and DOCSIS channel bonding. The DOCSIS capability will be ‘for future use’, but a data connection could support additional services, IPTV, etc. The units will also support MoCA for in-home networking, HTML, M-Card CableCARDs, and Dolby Digital Plus audio. And, unsurprisingly, they’ll support both native and OCAP software loads, which means it is likely they could run the TiVo OCAP software.

Dave Zatz has photos of the new Comcast TiVo software over at ZatzNotFunny. Dave managed to find someone running the new TiVo software on a Comcast Motorola DCT3416 and he has a number of photos of the interface and the remote. But it doesn’t look like it has changed since my report from CES in January or from the photos I took at the time. The labels on the remote appear to have changed a little, but not much, mainly the colored A/B/C/D buttons.

Still no word on consumer pricing or general availability. I live in Worcester, MA which is Charter Scientific Atlanta territory, so I can’t try this myself. I work over in Marlborough, MA. So if anyone in the area gets the TiVo software and is willing to have a stranger come over and poke at their cable box and maybe take some photos, let me know.

Dave Zatz over at Zatz Not Funny and Mari Silbey of Connected Home 2 Go (and ZNF) got some hands-on time with the new Verizon FiOS TV 2.0 platform.

It looks pretty good, Dave has a ton of screen-shots in his post and Verizon has done a decent job on the UI. Verizon is using Motorola DVRs, which seem to be a popular platform for 3rd party DVR software - with TiVo and Moxi both developing OCAP software for the platform, and, of course, today’s i-Guide in common use.

Verizon’s FiOS TV provides multi-room viewing over coax using the MoCA standard. This is real-time streaming to client boxes from the master unit, unlike TiVo’s MRV over the network which does a copy. It is similar to Digeo’s planned Firewire-over-coax streaming on the forthcoming Moxi units. I like the fact that it is streaming so you have dynamic access to the central content, and I wish TiVo had that, but I’d like to see standard networks, especially WiFi supported. Streaming today is only for SD content, but Verizon plans to add HD streaming in 2008.

I love TiVo, but I do think it is time for an overhaul of the UI. It hasn’t really changed since the early days, and it is looking a little dated. I liked the simple refresh of the OCAP software I saw at CES - it still felt like TiVo, but it seemed ‘cleaner’ somehow.

EDIT: Update, Mari has posted a number of photos.

Brothers On Tech has put together an image gallery comparing the TiVo Series3’s with the Comcast Motorola DCT6412 running i-Guide. It is a decent comparison, but it doesn’t capture all the features TiVo has that the Comcast box lacks, like WishLists.

BrothersOnTech.com by way of EngadgetHD.

As recently as November, 2006 Intel was opposed to the licensing terms for OCAP (the OpenCable Application Platform) and they opposed requiring consumer electronics (CE) vendors to support OCAP in general for two-way cable services. Well, things change, and apparently Intel is more comfortable with it now as they’ve signed a licensing agreement with Cable Television Laboratories (aka CableLabs). The license will allow Intel to incorporate OCAP support into their system-on-a-chip processors aimed at the CE market.

Kircos added that Intel’s agreement with CableLabs on OpenCable concerns only the chip family for CE devices it plans to introduce in 2008, “not a PC play per se, nor for our Core or Pentium processors at this point.”

I actually think this is more an issue of Intel being a large corporation with their fingers in several pies than a real reversal. Intel would still like to see a two-way standard that allows CE devices to access two-way cable services (SDV, VOD, etc) without the hefty overhead of supporting OCAP. However, at the same time, there is a market for chips that are going into the new generation of cable set top box and other devices which *will* support OCAP, and Intel wasn’t willing to cede the market to the competition over OCAP.

In another development, Microsoft and CableLabs have extended their partnership with a formal collaborative effort to develop ways for two-way cable services to function on PCs. It isn’t clear if this means embedding OCAP in Windows or developing an alternative system. I’d be a bit shocked if it is the former. OCAP is Java-based - and MS has a deep hatred for Java. The primary reason MS backs HD DVD over Blu-ray is that HD DVD uses iHD (developed my Microsoft and Toshiba) for interactive features while Blu-ray uses BD-Java - which is itself derived from the same MHP/GEM standards that OCAP was derived from, and hence related in a way. I just don’t see Microsoft grinning and paying for a Java license to embed Java in every copy of Windows MCE, not after the past acrimony over their JVM, etc. But I suppose stranger things have happened.

OCAP is running far behind schedule. It was originally anticipated to be widely deployed by the end of 2006, now the cable industry is claiming it will be widely deployed by the end of 2008. Delays in getting the OCAP infrastructure in place had cascaded to a number of delays, including delays in getting TiVo’s new OCAP-based software out for Comcast and Cox.

The majority of the CE industry has shunned OpenCable mainly due to the OCAP requirement. Adding support for OCAP increases the costs and complexity of their products and, at the same time, impacts their software design as features utilizing OCAP will run cable software and not the CE vendor’s own UI. This doesn’t sit well with the industry.

There have been some notable exceptions. Panasonic, LG, and Samsung have all licensed OCAP and are producing OCAP-compliant devices. It isn’t too surprising, as these companies product cable products for other countries. Until now, the US market was dominated by Motorola and Scientific Atlanta, and it was nearly impossible for a 3rd party to break in. Cable companies used Motorola head-end systems with Motorola STBs, or SA with SA. Now with CableCARD and OCAP, it is easier for 3rd parties to enter the market. Panasonic and Samsung are already making cable boxes for US Cable MSOs, utilizing CableCARD. Samsung is testing OCAP televisions with Time Warner.

If you’re making a cable STB, then OCAP isn’t a big issue. That’s the way the industry is going and Motorola and SA are supporting OCAP on their products, so competitors will do the same. OCAP is based on the MHP/GEM standards used in STBs around the world, so supporting OCAP isn’t a big leap for vendors already making STBs in other countries.

If you’re making high-end TVs it isn’t so bad either. The cost can be absorbed, and since the TV didn’t really have much in the way of interactivity and advanced features, there isn’t a conflict between OCAP and the CE vendors own software and UI. So LG and Samsung testing the waters for OCAP TVs isn’t a big surprise.

However, if you produce more advanced products, like TiVo or Digeo, then yielding control to OCAP is a big deal. And cost is an issue for most CE products, with the cost of supporting OCAP being non-negligible - both in the added hardware and in the required licenses. Which is why CE vendors really want a simple, basic way to handle two-way features without all of the baggage of OCAP. OCAP is pretty hefty, and a lot more than is needed to handle simple tasks like SDV or ordering VOD.

There could possibly be some progress on this front this week, as the FCC is holding an open meeting in Portland, ME to discuss the issue, amongst other agenda items.

Connected Home 2 Go reported on a forthcoming OCAP SDK from Motorola. (CH2G is a Motorola blog.)

For the non-geeks, OCAP is the OpenCable Applications Platform, a new Java-based platform that the cable industry is migrating toward. TiVo’s software for Comcast and Cox is currently written for an ‘OCAP precursor’ and it will be fully OCAP as the platform matures. And an ‘SDK’ is a Solutions Developers Kit - a set of tools used by developers to write applications for a given platform. So what this means is that Motorola is releasing a tool kit for developers to help them write applications that will run on the new OCAP compatible cable boxes and other OCAP devices. It should be available in Q3.

While this will make it easier for small development houses to create OCAP applications, the platforms are still a closed system. It would be up to the cable MSO to allow a given application to run on their boxes. It is possible that some MSOs may open the doors wide for 3rd party ‘widgets’ and such, but it remains to be seen how easy it will be for end users to access 3rd party apps on their cable box. It seems likely to be similar to cell phones, where most phones are locked down and only approved apps from the carrier can be accessed. But there is also the opportunity, with CableCARD, for 3rd party STB vendors to sell OCAP compatible STBs which allow users to load additional OCAP software - much like some high-end phones, and most smartphones, allow users to load any 3rd party software they wish.

In other news, I registered for CES 2008 and made my hotel reservations last night. I know it isn’t until January, but trust me, all the cheap and/or convenient rooms fill up fast. From experience I insist on staying in a hotel on a monorail stop - no better way to get up and down the strip. I’ll be at the Sahara again this time. I’d love a swanky suite and all, but I pay for this trip out of pocket. I’m not exactly a media powerhouse.