According to the latest information from the cable industry, just 443,000 American consumers are using CableCARDs, designed to allow users to break free of the obligation of using a rented cable (or phone) industry TV set top box. That fairly pathetic number is up from just 407,000 in June, despite the fact the cable industry says they've shipped more than 16.7 million set-top boxes with CableCARD functionality.
Every time the cable industry releases these stats we see the
same story reprinted about how poorly CableCARDs are doing, accompanied by sort of a "golly shucks" shrugging inference that because shipped CableCARD supported devices are so high and CableCARD use is so low, consumers must just must not be interested in the idea. But the difference between shipped units and adoption doesn't automatically mean consumers don't want them. It might mean they couldn't get them or didn't know about them.
Still, that CableCARDs simply aren't wanted is certainly the meme repeated by the cable industry (and its loyal industry trade mags) once or twice a year:
quote:
"[I]n just over 24 months, cable operators have deployed almost 38 times as many CableCard-enabled devices [as] the total number of CableCards requested by customers for use in retail devices in over the last five years," NCTA general counsel Neal Goldberg wrote in the industry's quarterly report to the FCC, which was filed Tuesday.
Of course neither the cable industry or these news reports mention the fact that the cable carriers don't bother to advertise the CableCARD, so most American consumers (even technically savvy ones) have no idea they exist. Not only are they not advertised, we've had countless customers tell us that when they've called their cable company to inquire about the technology, they've been told it isn't offered. When they are offered, the installation experience
often isn't pretty.
CableCARDs erode set top box, VOD and PPV revenues (however slim), on top of requiring additional truck rolls for a technology carriers don't want to offer in the first place. As such, a growing number of consumers believe the cable industry has intentionally made the CableCARD adoption process one of the most convoluted and obnoxious experiences humanly possible. Think water boarding meets the DMV.
To comply with an FCC mandate the cable industry does use CableCARDs in their own devices, but they're embedded in their own units at the warehouse. Meanwhile, many companies give technicians virtually no training, and it shows. When customers do realize CableCARDs exist and go to order them, installation is
quite often a nightmare. Tivo has dealt with this so often they provide
extra instructions (pdf) specifically for your installer.
Granted it's not all the cable industry's fault that a promising technology isn't seeing substantive adoption. The FCC has consistently bungled regulation aimed at improving adoption, and vendor support for CableCARDs has often been inconsistent. The inability to provide bi-directional support for VOD and other interactive services will also plague CableCARDs until Tru2Way is deployed. But if there's a primary culprit for a lack of CableCARD adoption, it's the cable industry itself.
