We saw back in December that the FCC had basically called CableCARD a failed attempt to bring openness to the cable industry. They didn’t simply leave it at that though. The FCC then asked for ideas from the industry for ways to be improve the locked-down situation that currently plagues the cable set-top box market. Most figured the FCC would be inundated with requests to completely do away with CableCARD in place of a completely new standard.
Ceton isn’t like most companies in the industry though. On Thursday, April 8th the Kirland Washington based company sent a letter of their own to the FCC to try to get their views across. It’s not a long letter at only five pages, but it’s easy to summarize. Ceton made it abundantly clear that they think that CableCARD is really just now starting to make real progress in the market. While the standards behind CableCARD have been around since 1998, real functional products, according to Ceton, didn’t really start to penetrate the market until 2007. With only three years of solid data to base a decision of this magnitude off of, it seems silly to throw out the baby with the bath water already.
Ceton acknowledges that development of new products for CableCARD is quite complex, but that CableLabs and the vast number of cable companies that they have worked with have been very helpful, beneficial, and impartial in their support. Maybe the section of the letter that most clearly states how Ceton feels would be the following:
Although the CableCARD solution is technically complex and can be difficult to implement, the security and DRM problems which CableCARD addresses and solves are equally difficult. It is unlikely another CA/security/DRM solution would be “simple” and significantly less difficult to implement.
In the end I think Ceton made solid points in their letter. It would be easy to take a cynical approach and assume that their only motivation is to keep CableCARD around so that they can continue to sell their InfiniTV CableCARD tuners. I think that would do a disservice to the company, and to the letter though. While Ceton clearly has a vested interest in CableCARD they also made comments and suggestions on the FCC’s recently released Broadband plan. Ceton obviously wants to secure their short-term product viability, but they are also trying to help improve the future situation at the same time.
No matter how you interpret the letter, or the FCC’s recent statements, there is one thing we can all agree on: it is a very good thing that the FCC is willing to seriously scrutinize its past decisions, and an even better thing that they are asking for feedback from the industry they serve for guidance going forward.
