Digital Home Thoughts: Cablecard Replacement By 2012, Temporary Fix By This Fall

"The biggest news is that the FCC has asked the industry to come up with a residential IP gateway that is open and that will provide same abilities as your provider's equipment, and most importantly, it should enable the very same gear to work no matter what type of service you prefer, whether it be satellite, cable or fiber. But while the FCC has given the industry until December of 2012 to define and deploy these IP gateways before implementing an "appropriate enforcement mechanism," in the meantime the FCC wants to see the biggest issues with CableCARDs resolved by this Fall."

For all the Tivo and HTPC enthusiasts out there this is great news. The ability to replace your service, but still use the same equipment should be a great selling point for any hardware vendor trying to sell third party set top boxes. It is also good news that the FCC is trying to make current Cablecard offerings more competitive with the service supplied set top boxes. One of the FCC's list of fixes includes allowing software to use Cablecard based tuners without having to go through the full Cablelabs certification. This means you could buy your HTPC with a Cablelabs certified tuner and run whatever software you wanted on it. This is sure to please all those MythTV users out there.