CableCARD - Background

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.

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. 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 was shifted forward twice and went into effect July 1, 2007.

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 as long as they are not part of a switched video system. (This applies to one-way devices only, two-way devices are capable of receiving and viewing switched video. The ability for one-way devices to receive and view switched video has changed with the addition of the Tuning Resolver Interface Specification. Tuning adaptors and tuning adaptor interfaces have been added to provide communication back to the headend needed for switched video.) CableCARDs are not necessary for viewing unscrambled digital cable channels if the user has a QAM tuner — a feature in some televisions and DVRs. 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 to which the cable customer has subscribed, 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.