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Old 02-29-2008, 08:26 AM   #41
feldon34
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Join Date: Dec 2000

Location: Rock Hill, SC
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DirecTV-10 (a satellite) was launched in July 2007. It added capacity for 100 national HD channels.

Cable's solution for adding capacity is packet switching. This means that if you have two TVs in your house and one is watching Disney and the other is watching HBO, then the only channels that would be coming into your home would be Disney and HBO. With normal cable TV, all the channels are coming into your home all the time. With packet switching, your TVs (or using a cable box) actually send a request for the channels they want to watch and those are the only ones that are sent from the headend to your house.

This sounds logical and great, until you start thinking about TiVo and other video recorders that want to record 2 channels simultaneously (I know, how can someone watch that much TV, but remember that TV networks routinely pit popular shows against each other, forcing you to watch one or the other -- TiVo with dual tuners fixes that). The cable industry has fought tooth and nail against TiVo and against opening up their standards.

or

You might have heard of CableCard. It was something that the cable industry was forced to do to allow us to watch digital cable without having to rent one of those prehistoric, klunky, slow, buggy, advertising-laden cable boxes. CableCard shrinks down the relevant guts of a cable box down into something the size of a credit card. With a CableCard, you can watch all the channels provided by your cable company on your TV, your TiVo, or (eventually) your PC without having to use a cable box. BUT, the CableCard standard did not include provisions for the packet switching above.

So TiVo is once again out-of-luck in packet switching neighborhoods, even after spending millions designing the TiVo Series 3 (with 2 cablecard slots), lobbying the FCC and their own marketing campaigns to get CableCard ratified.
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