Eyeing 2-Way Devices, Cable Borrows From Wireless Playbook

“We're making some modest progress,” especially the past six months, McSlarrow said in an interview. An earlier stall in talks prompted the Consumer Electronics Association in November to make its own plug and play proposal at the FCC. CEA’s plans prompted the FCC to prepare a notice of proposed rulemaking on 2-way plug and play devices, set for a vote Thursday. The notice will “spur all the parties involved with getting on with the discussions,” McSlarrow said. Review will take time, since it involves multiple parties along with the cable and electronics groups, he added: “There’s a natural drag. Every party added to the negotiations has a slowing effect.” A CEA spokesman confirmed the group continues to participate in plug and play discussions. “We wish the process were moving more quickly,” he said, lauding what he described as the commission’s “interest in speeding up the process.”

The OpenCable “platform” aims to fill an interoperability gap separating various types of devices and the 7,000 plus cable systems in the U.S., said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable senior vice president of strategy and development. Lacking shared standards, cable vendors have separate applications for about 15 set-top box models, with programs often tweaked for use by other cable operators. Leddy said standards variations put cable at a “a big competitive disadvantage” to satellite TV providers, which avoid such hurdles since there are only two providers of nationwide service. “We need to get away from that level of complexity,” Leddy said: “The role of middleware is not something the cable industry invented,” he said, referring to software that operates set-top boxes.

CableLab’s latest round of deals means PCs that are using Microsoft’s Vista operating system eventually will be able to download cable applications, said Leddy. NCTA said the cable industry’s research and development arm, CableLabs, will work with Microsoft on “expanding the scope of the cable services delivered to the PC platform” to two-way devices. Under the accord with Intel, the company’s widely used system-on-a-chip microprocessors will work with set-top boxes, digital video records and other OpenCable devices, said NCTA.

Cable is turning to Java, used for years by the cellphone industry to run programs on millions of cellphones, Leddy told the audience of young Capitol Hill aides and the media advisor to FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell. The event aimed to let aides see new devices, such as debuted in Las Vegas at the May cable industry show. Fewer members of Congress are coming to such shows, McSlarrow said: “There’s a lot that’s happening at those conventions that people in D.C. don’t see.” He said this event sought to show cable’s own “digital transition,” in which cable operators try to get analog customers to buy digital cable.

Cable executives are keen to convert analog customers so they can free bandwidth for interactive TV and broadband with download speeds of more than 100 Mbps, they said. “The analog technology is the most inefficient thing that we have in our planet,” said Mark Coblitz, Comcast’s senior vice president of strategic planning. “It does take those channels that are available” for other uses such as superfast Internet access, video on demand and high-definition TV channels, he said. Motorola officials demonstrated technology for “channel bonding,” which boosts broadband speeds by letting cable providers send data on multiple channels. Using switched digital gear from Motorola and other vendors, cable operators free capacity for broadband by no longer sending all channels to all TVs. “Not everybody is watching every channel at one time,” said Coblitz. “Ratings are small for a lot of channels.”