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Thursday, December 30, 2004

Cable TV in a Card
Today's Circuits in the NY Times has a piece on a new product called the CableCard that does away with your cable box. Sounds great at first until you realize a few things. First, you need a TV with a PC Card slot. Then, you lose the onscreen cable guide and the ability to order Pay Per view movies or video on demand if you have that option. The last three are no biggies in my book since TiVo provides its own guide and I never user pay per view or have access to VOD, but I think they are missing the point.

Why doesn't this plug into your laptop?? Why can't I take along my cable subscription when I travel, or add a card to my desktop PC and record shows to my hard drive? Am I missing something?

# Permalink Posted at 1:22 PM 3 comments Email this Link

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What this does seem to do, however, is give the cable companies tighter controls on what's plugged into the cable line when the attachment doesn't require a selector box. (As in basic cable service.) I wonder if they can scram the image through it....

# posted by Bill 3:42 PM

Anyone who has basic cable shouldn't have a cable box anyway... All new (90's and newer) have built in cable tuners. Im not going to but a TV that has a PCMCIA slot, Why should I?

And why this product does not offer the same "features" as extended cable offers does not make sence...

Now putting this thing in your laptop requires the competing calbe companies to work together to provide a roaming customer to get his/her channels (preferably in the order they are accustomed to) over a competitors lines...

Overall, not a product that will have any market unless you are forced to have one. THat would be a bad business move in my opinion.

# posted by Anonymous 5:14 PM

The advantage of the cablecard over a basic cable subscription is two-fold: First, you get premium channels, and second it supports HDTV.

Sound & Vision magazine ran blurbs on one of their editors' attempts to get the cablecard to work -- it took months to get it to work properly.

I look at it a lot like Bill in that it gives them tighter control over the equipment. In particular, you're not going to use that thing with Tivo, the only feature of the external boxes that matters a whit to me.

jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com

# posted by Jim Frost 8:02 AM

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