Cable, CEA to Announce Plug-and-Play
By Karen Brown -- Multichannel News, 12/18/2002 12:39:00 PM
After long negotiations and at least one delay, it looks like the cable and consumer electronics-industries are going to announce an agreement Thursday that could lead to digital-cable set-top functions being built directly into digital-TV sets.
The National Cable & Telecommunications Association and the Consumer Electronics Association have scheduled a joint press conference in the nation's capital at 11:30 a.m. Thursday to discuss the "plug-and-play" agreement.
The agreement is aimed at spurring adoption of digital and high-definition TV by making more products available at retail.
While details have yet to be announced, industry sources said the agreement will pave the way for unidirectional devices sold at retail.
Lacking a return channel to process interactive applications including video-on-demand and network-based digital-video-recorder commands, the units nevertheless would be able to display cable-television signals with the addition of a point-of-deployment interface card supplied by the cable operator.
The POD cards, created under Cable Television Laboratories Inc.'s OpenCable specifications, would carry the authorization and decryption to view cable-television content.
Consumer-electronics manufacturers building the unidirectional plug-and-play devices would have to sign the POD Host Interface License Agreement (PHILA) included in OpenCable.
If consumers wanted two-way services such as VOD, they would have to get digital-cable boxes from their cable providers. In the future, the agreement could be expanded to include bidirectional devices.
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