THE FRONT LINE: OCTOBER 22, 2004
CableCARD is coming to a PCMCIA slot near you! What’s it all about?
CableCARD is a new way to watch digital cable TV programs without a cable set-top receiver. Instead, a PCMCIA card plugs into a slot on your TV, giving you access to standard and premium SDTV and HDTV programs.
CableCARD has been in the works for several years, starting with an agreement among 14 manufacturers and CableLabs in late 2002 to bring the technology to market. Spurred on by the FCC’s mandates to include terrestrial digital TV tuners in big screen TVs starting in July of 2004, manufacturers worried that such sets wouldn’t sell well unless they could also receive digital cable programming.
The first crop of CableCARD TV sets started showing up in Best Buy and Tweeter stores around here in July. I managed to procure several review units for a hands-on test here in my studio with the able and willing assistance of Comcast personnel including Keith Boyd at Comcast University, Mark Bogle, Brian Saylor, and Janet Steiner of Comcast’s Ivyland (PA) regional office, and David Landsman of Comcast’s Plymouth Meeting (PA) call center.
An extensive report on those tests will appear in the February 2005 issue of Stereophile Ultimate AV magazine. In the meantime, here are some interesting things I learned (and a few I found out the hard way):
First, CableCARD is a 100% one-way system. All it lets you do is receive programs. These programs can’t be time-shifted (unless you have special equipment), nor will you see any electronic program guide (EPG) info with them – that require a two-way path between TV and cable system head end.
You also can’t order pay-per-view (PPV) or use video-on-demand (VOD) with CableCARD – at least, not this implementation of it. All you can do is order and pay for specific tiers of channels and watch them to your heart’s content, which is something more akin to the old analog ‘basic cable’ service model.
If you purchase a CableCARD set (usually labeled with the “Digital Cable Ready” logo), you’ll need to get a card from your local cable company. Some charge a rental for it; others provide it as part of the service (which is what Comcast does). Once this card is plugged into your TV, a set-up screen will provide you with four strings of numbers which you will, in turn, provide to your cable customer service representative top enable the service.
The three CableCARD TVs I tested all describe this service differently. One explained that I would first have to obtain an application to get CableCARD service and that I should “contact my customer service representative to discuss receiving an application”. That’s as far as the description went.
The other TVs were a bit more succinct in explaining how CableCARD worked (fortunately) but provided vastly different on-screen menus on how to set it up. With a CableCARD, there is no need to do a digital channel scan – the card contains all of the available channel information.
Problem is, only one of those two sets had any kind of menu that would show me a list of the available digital cable stations. The other set required me to push the channel up/down button to navigate, or write down channel numbers on my own for future reference.
Because of a design flaw, one of the sets required that I always connect digital cable signals through the main antenna input, which is fine. However, this input shows up on screen labeled as “AIR”, which is not fine! To make matters more confusing, off-air digital TV signals must then be connected to the second or auxiliary antenna input, which shows up in the menu as (you guessed it) “CABLE”.
The cards are not particularly difficult to install (see photos) but they must be inserted carefully into a pair of guide rails before they are homed into place. Otherwise, you run the risk of bending or damaging the pins, which is a manufacturer (not cable company) repair issue.
On two of the sets, you can have off-air digital TV and digital cable connected at the same time, switching back and forth between antenna/cable inputs as desired. On the third set, only one digital RF input is provided, so if you want to hook up a second digital TV source, you’d have to use the DVI or HDMI inputs.
Despite all of these quirks, the CableCARDs worked like a champ in all three sets. One word of caution – don’t try to pull an authorized card from one set, plug it into another DCR TV, and expect it to work. Ain’t gonna happen!
You’ll need to re-authorize that new TV and there will be a new set of numbers to read back to your cable company. And if you realize your science experiment isn’t going to work and put the card back into its original set, it will not work there without re-authorization. (Best to leave well enough alone!)
In a nutshell: CableCARD works very well. If you just want to watch and don’t care about interactive services, it’s a simple way to get digital cable. Of course, if you decide you do want all that interactive stuff, you can always turn in your card and get a full-blown cable set-top receiver from your cable company.
Figure 1A – Here’s a CableCARD slot on the rear panel of a DLP rear-projection TV…
Figure 1B - …but you must be careful not to jam the card in its guide rails.
Figure 2A – Here’s the slot on a new integrated plasma TV.
Figure 2B – Installation into this slot is a piece of cake.
Figure 3A – Even outboard AV control centers have CableCARD slots.
Figure 3B – This is the easiest installation of all.
Figure 4 – Here’s a typical OSD of available digital cable channels.
Figure 5 – Here’s a typical OSD of available off-air digital channels.
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Want to know more about those CableCARD TVs? Look for the
February 2005 issue of
Stereophile Ultimate AV, which should be hitting newsstands in late December
of this year.