CableCARD

CableCARD from what I have found so far is a 16-bit PC Card in a PCMCIA format. CableCARD was designed to replace the cable box from the cable company; any company could produce a CableCARD from the standard so you were not locked into renting from the cable company. This was a government thing, I guess the FCC.

CableCARD appears as a PCMCIA slot on the back of HDTV sets.

Any how version 1.0 came out last year from I understand and it has a few draw backs. Information only flows one-way with CableCARD. So with CableCARD you are not able to use Pay-per-view because the card only receives signals from the cable company it does not send information out to them. Seems like a lot of people are already waiting for CableCARD 2.0 to come out to address the short comings of version 1.0.

So CableCARD from a hardware view is just another implementation of the PCMCIA card. Why they used the out-dated PC Card interface escapes me.

Here is the new CableCARD listing.