Comcast and Switch Digital Cable

[eagles2k3]

I'm looking at picking up the new HD Tivos and I'm worried about this switch technology that the cable operators are moving to. I saw on the Tivo site tha they are working on a solution for this, but I assume there will be some lag between when the cable operators move to it and when the adapter is available. Does anyone know when this switching technology will be used (preferably if anyone has any info on the Seatle Comcast area)? I did do a search on switch but it's just too common of a term here in the forums to get a good set of results back, so I apologize if this has been rehashed already.

[mbhuff]

Try looking for "SDV" for switched digital video. Also check the FAQ on SDV in this forum. As far as the "dongle" to support SDV with TiVO, it's in my opinion a pipe dream. It will never happen.

Even if it comes close to happening, the cable companies will come up with something like "USDV" or Ultra-Switch-Digital-Video, they will do whatever it takes to make sure third-party equipment never works 100% reliably.

Read their Edgar fillings for the cable companies. Their future projections of revenue growth is by selling services such as classified ads (cars and real estate to start with) and they plan to offer ebay/craigslist and other services. This will only work if they control the user interface. This is why they are pushing what they call "OCAP" or OpenCable. There's nothing Open about it. They way it works is any third party hardware will download the software that the Cable Companies choose instead of something like TiVO.

Comcast has a Tivo Implementation over OCAP but it's just now becoming available in the northeast, and even then it will be limited.