Cable Card Purchase?

Nope. Have to rent from the provider. At least that is true for all major providers, there are a few small companies that allow purchased cards.

uw69 said:

I noticed on e-bay that there are some cable cards (Motorola M cards) for sale. Can you purchase these cards and avoid the cable co.'s rental fee?

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Not for most Cable Companies. Cards are provisioned and configured by the Cable Company. I've never heard of one allowing you to bring your own CableCARD.

sbiller said:

Not for most Cable Companies. Cards are provisioned and configured by the Cable Company. I've never heard of one allowing you to bring your own CableCARD.

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BYOCC - Love the idea but alas there's nothing in it for the cable operator. Plus with all the issues that crop up with installation I appreciate being able to tell the cable guy to just figure it out and let me know when he's done. If it were my CC I have little doubt that at the first sign of an issue he would be running for the door (or hanging up on me as the case may be.)

uw69 said:

I noticed on e-bay that there are some cable cards (Motorola M cards) for sale. Can you purchase these cards and avoid the cable co.'s rental fee?

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What if your cable company's head end is set up for some brand of card other than Motorola?

So I gather there is no use for the cards on sale on e-bay?

uw69 said:

So I gather there is no use for the cards on sale on e-bay?

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There's a few small cable companies that will sometimes allow customers to use their own. This is usually because they don't carry the cards themselves. However, this is very rare and no major cable company allows the practice.

uw69 said:

So I gather there is no use for the cards on sale on e-bay?

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It seems a few Canadians have had a bit of luck purchasing the cards off eBay and then persuading their cable company to enable them for use with Series 3 units.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=470307

You MIGHT be able to use them *just* for tuning the unencrypted channels. That would save you a couple bucks a month, but you wouldn't get the premium or 'extended basic' channels. I would like someone to try that experiment.

I know I got some channels before correctly setting up cablecards.

mattack said:

You MIGHT be able to use them *just* for tuning the unencrypted channels. That would save you a couple bucks a month, but you wouldn't get the premium or 'extended basic' channels. I would like someone to try that experiment.

I know I got some channels before correctly setting up cablecards.

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Your cards were initialized by the cable company already though, just not paired. I don't see how a purchased card would already be initialized. It's possible, but I doubt it.