Future of CableCARD by EDITOR

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If there were a viable market for 3rd party STBs you would see people like Arris sell boxes at retail. It is a chicken and egg sort of issue. As long as one party controls the gateway, no one else wants to enter the market.

 

Nail hit squarely and firmly on the head!

 

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The other barrier to entry currently for 3rd party DVRs is that CableCard doesn't apply to DBS, and thus probably half or more of the high-end, tech-savvy customers are locked up on DirecTV.

 

Is the cable industry position essentially that anyone should be able to manufacture a set-top box, but they will be indistinguishable to the user since they will all be running the cableco's app?

 

I think the term is "astroturfing": an artificial "grass roots" campaign.

 

That makes sense. As we have seen with TiVo, the MSO's VOD experience is far better than a third party experience, but at the same time, we need direct access to linear content for DVR functionality.

 

Care to explain? Since I have FiOS, I don't have access to VOD, but the few times I have seen it on a FiOS DVR the UI was horrible enough I doubt I would ever touch VOD.

I would much rather have a TiVo UI presenting and controlling VOD playback rather than using an app that doesn't consistently use the buttons as TiVo does.

 

Tivo has lost millions of retail subscribers since 2007, because of cable cards and being shut out of the retail satellite TV market. I think the demand would return if you didn't need a cable card or could even hook a new Tivo up to satellite TV. The retail Tivo DVRs have improved significantly over the years and there is no reason for customers to abandon them other than the new physical barriers.

 

I'm comparing XoD (Xfinity VOD) on a TiVo Premiere/Mini combo compared to an X1, which I have literally side by side on the same TV. The TiVo XoD is really ugly and kludgy compared to X1. Half the time TiVo doesn't even work. That being said, since I have TiVo, I don't really need XoD, so I'd much rather have the TiVo than the good XoD experience.

All VOD systems are pretty locked down, and they don't have true FF/RW, if they have any FF at all, so they don't really behave like TiVo, although to your point, the button layouts aren't as bizarre as you'd find for Amazon/Netflix on TiVo.

YES! DirecTV is the big problem for TiVo. A lot of the customers who would buy TiVos are on DirecTV because their CONUS/Regional service is absolutely superior to any cable or telco TV option except FIOS (which might be a tie), and their LiLs, excepting the lack of subchannels and PEG programming, are often also superior.

 

It's not just CONUS (Continental US), it's superior here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean too!

I'm so torn right now between returning fully to directv or continuing with this hybrid of both.

 

DirecTV is now AT&T, in fact, AT&T just announced they are dropping the DirecTV name and changing everything to AT&T Entertainment. Time will tell how badly they f**k everything up and how high they raise the price.

 

Well, technically, you have to have a larger dish to get signals in HI and AK... But yeah, it is available out there. My uncle in AK has it with MLB EI. It's a pretty sweet setup with the 1.2m dish.

 

Yes, same setup here.

It's mainly due to the angle we are at compared to the satellites and the spread between them from out here.

 

X1 also looks like it does what Tivo does with Netflix etc and gives you option to stream a show from its VoD service right from the recorded show folder.

 

So it's after Dec 4, 2015. Did anything actually change with the laws regarding Cablecards? I'm confused.

 

Yeah, I'm not too sure about that, as I don't use it as a DVR. I have TiVo for that.