Set-toping

Very interesting ruling coming down against Comcast today (see also /. article). Basically says that cable companies must allow third-party set-top devices on their network. Which means to say "cable companies must support CableCards". Comcast didn't want to be forced to support CableCards because

"...cable cards are soon to be made redundant by technology that would allow the security features of the card to be downloaded directly."

I guess that means some sort of "virtual cable card", which I can recall hearing rumblings about, but never details. Given the amount of trouble we're having at work trying to get CableCards to do the right things, it will probably take some time to get the virtual versions to work. Frankly I think it would require more computing horsepower in the devices than we see now. Right now I believe the hardware we are developing OCAP on is less powerful than some cellphones.

I probably am guessing wrong at what Comcast was asking for though - probably wanted to be able to keep their old settops that could run OCAP so the system would support third-party devices, but they all didn't have to be. Oh well - guess I'll find out what the details are some time in the near future.