Information AboutCablecard |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT CABLECARD | |
| cable television | |
| digital television | |
| digital cable | |
|
]] BACKGROUND The portion of the 1996 Telecom law which resulted in the creation of CableCARDs is known as Section 629, instructing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to: "...assure the commercial availability to consumers of multichannel video programming and other services offered over multichannel video programming systems, of converter boxes, interactive communications equipment, and other equipment used by consumers to access multichannel video programming and other services offered over multichannel video programming systems, from manufacturers, retailers, and other vendors not affiliated with any multichannel video programming distributor." Multichannel video programming refers to cable or satellite television. A driving motivation of this passage was to foster the kind of consumer choices that resulted after the Federal government landmark Carterfone ruling requiring telephone companies to allow consumers to purchase third party telephones for attachment to the phone company network. The thought was that consumers would benefit from wider choices due to competition between Consumer Electronics (CE) manufacturers unaffiliated with cable companies.1 The FCC was charged with working with industry to carry out the directives of the 1996 law. On June 11, 1998, after securing proposals and recommendations from interested parties, the FCC ordered that cable companies would provide a separable security access device by July 1, 2000 which could be used by third-party devices to access digital cable networks.2 One important issue was the concern that cable companies might not be motivated to provide efficient security access mechanisms for competitor companies to use. To address this, the FCC directed that the cable companies would by January 1, 2005 also have to use a separable access device that was also available to third parties. The cable company would be banned from providing devices that relied on a security access mechanism integrated with the device after the 2005 deadline. This rule is usually referred to as the "integration ban", and has been unsuccessfully challenged in the courts and in FCC petitions by the cable companies. The deadline has been shifted forward twice and went into effect July 1, 2007.3 The separable security device was referred to in FCC regulations as a "Point of Deployment" (POD) module. After many requests for delay from the cable industry, the first CableCARD devices became available from third party manufacturers in August 2004. CableCARDs may be used to access both Standard Definition and High Definition channels. CableCARDs are not necessary for viewing unscrambled digital cable channels if the user has a QAM Tuner — a feature in some televisions and DVR s. CableCARD support is most common on higher end televisions that include a special slot for the CableCARD and a built-in cable tuner. The card acts like a unique "key" to unlock the channels and services which the cable customer has subscribed to, and the television's remote-control will also control the cable channels. Televisions that support CableCARD should be labeled by the manufacturer as " Digital Cable Ready ", or DCR.''' EXISTING CABLECARD STANDARD AND CERTIFICATION PROCEDURES Cable providers in the United States are required by the FCC to support the CableCARD standard. The specification for devices conforming to this standard is known as CableCARD 1.0, and allows access to all the features that consumers most commonly use, but cannot access services which require two-way communication with the cable company servers. The specification was developed by CableLabs , a research group run by a consortium of cable companies. Devices that use CableCARDs are known as "Hosts" and must be certified as compliant with the specification by CableLabs. The certification process can take significant amounts of time and is performed in batches on a regular cycle every 3 months. With rare exceptions, all cable companies in the United States are required to provide CableCARDs conforming to this specification, and must correct incompatibilities between their networks and certified CableCARD devices. The FCC requests that complaints be made directly to the FCC concerning problems with cable companies refusing to offer CableCARDs, or providing poor support for them. The FCC may be reached here . The current CableCARD standard was born out of an adversarial process between two main groups: cable companies represented by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and consumer electronics companies represented by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The portion of the CableCARD specs that could be agreed on describe how one-way services work, and so only this portion gained FCC support. Most of the remainder of the specs were swept into Cablelabs' proposal for the enhancement of the CableCARD standard known as CableCARD 2.0. Although an Optical Cable service, Verizon FiOS is classified as a cable service and must by FCC rules also support the CableCARD standard. No cable providers in Canada currently support CableCARD. Video providers in Europe must conform to the DVB standard which is a more comprehensive open standard governed by independent standards bodies. CableCARD also supports non-television functions. It can also act as a Cable Modem controller, again with the host providing modulation and demodulation functions, and the card providing decoding and IP Routing functionality; however this feature is rarely used, and depends on the cable provider. PHYSICAL CABLECARDS The physical CableCARD that is inserted into the host device is a PCMCIA type II card which handles Decryption of video, and making sure that only people that have paid for the channel may view it. This is also known as " Conditional Access Module " function. There are two kinds of physical CableCARDs:
MCards are sometimes referred to as CableCARD 2.0 cards, although they do not themselves provide any of the CableCARD 2.0 features, such as interactivity. MCards are Backward Compatible with current CableCARD devices. To older CableCARD devices that do not support multiple streams, the card appears to be a single stream card. CE companies have long wanted MCards for their CableCARD 1.0 host devices in order to compete with Cable company devices that use multiple tuners. This is important for products such as Sony & TiVo CableCARD DVR s, televisions with Picture-in-picture and CableCARD-equipped Personal Computers , which need to be able to record one show while the user is watching another. Without MCards, these products must rely on two SCards, and installation and support is more error-prone. Simple availability of MCards is insufficient if MCards are not supported on cable company servers by a specified date. No such date exists, and so CE companies are uncertain when they will be able to sell products that rely on MCards. A common misconception is that there is a CableCARD 2.0 physical card that will provide two way services and will not be compatible with CableCARD 1.0 certified devices. This is not the case. CableCARD 2.0 host devices will only use either SCards or MCards that also work with CableCARD 1.0. Interactive CableCARD 2.0 features rely on additional circuitry in the CableCARD Host device, not on the physical card. There is no directionality about the cards. This makes the name "CableCARD 2.0" extremely misleading, since it mostly has nothing to do with the physical CableCARDs. CABLECARD MANUFACTURERS As of January, 2007, two manufacturers have M-Cards (multi-stream cards) qualified by CableLabs: and NDS Group . PROPOSALS FOR CABLECARD'S NEXT VERSION Two proposals exist for enhancing the CableCARD standard. Both are designed to add support for two-way features whose operation details the CE and cable company representatives could not agree on in time for inclusion in the CableCARD 1.0 specification. These two-way features include ordering Pay-per-view via remote, Video On Demand , advanced Electronic Programming Guide information, and Switched Video services. These features are not supported by CableCARD 1.0, and so are not available with current CableCARD-enabled products. The CableCARD 2.0 proposal is a set of formal specifications advocated by the cable companies. The CableCARD 2.0 proposal does not specify a standard protocol for interacting with cable company servers, as is usually done with Client-server architectures. Instead, the proposal specifies that the host machine provide a Java environment capable of running OCAP programs downloaded from the cable company. Cable companies generally advocate this position so that they can be sure that moneymaking interactive services may be reliably supported for each of the CE vendor machines without requiring each vendor to write custom software. CE vendors, on the other hand, argue the specification goes far beyond the requirement of a separable security device, and intrusively specifies the internal operations of their devices. This, they argue, turns their products into non unique commodities that no CE companies will be able to make profits on. Current CableCARD 2.0 negotiations remain at an impasse. Cable companies have said they will not be changing the specification substantively. Equipment with CableCARD 2.0 support is expected in 2007, since cable companies are going ahead without FCC approval and are commissioning Samsung , LG , and Panasonic to build devices to the specification. CE and computer companies advocate a different proposal, which modifies the CableCARD 2.0 spec. This proposal was presented to the FCC on November 7, 2006 and has the goal of persuading the FCC to support a standard less aligned with cable company interests. Specifically, they have advocated that OCAP be dropped as a requirement for simple interactive services such as Video on Demand, interactive television listings and Pay-Per-View. This proposal would require that some additional functionality be added to MCards with support on most servers available by January 1, 2008. Further, they have requested that consumers should "be allowed to save content to a DVR , to move content to a second or third TV, to a PC or to a portable device, subject only to the rules and limits set by the content provider and not subject to artificial and arbitrary limitations set by the cable operator." To this end, they have requested that the FCC order that the CableCARD Host Licensing Agreement (CHILA) be immediately modified to accept all output protection technologies approved by Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA). Another proposal is that the CableLabs certification process be streamlined into that a standardized test suite, so that CE companies can self-certify devices without needing to wait for CableLabs approval.4 A portion of the CableCARD 2.0 proposals that will be available prior to approval of the remainder of the specification regards the multistream cards (MCards). Some DVR manufacturers have held off on integrating CableCARD slots into their machines until MCards are available. Others, such as Sony, TiVo and Microsoft bypassed the MCard delays and record two channels by using two SCards. MCards are expected in the spring of 2007. ISSUES WITH CABLECARDS |
|
|