Promising so much since I began looking at the technology at IBC2004, CableCARD hasn’t delivered anything yet into the Asia-Pacific/Pacific Rim region I work in.
Combined with Common Interface Conditional Access Modules, CableCARD could allow an interoperability landscape to flourish amongst HDTVs, Set Top Boxes, media centres and content services.
Do we know what The Next Great Standard for TV is? No, and I’d never pretend anything different.
But the two standards mentioned above exist now, and if used in combination by an end user (such as an HDTV with a CableCARD in Slot 1, and a Neotion CAM in Slot 2) could create a display with aftermarket, yet built-in, IPTV, smartcard-based decryption and MPEG4.