So, I've written quite a bit about cablecard in Canada over the last few months.  I've written a very beurocratic sounding letter to the CRTC, I've written a very newsy sounding press release, and I've written a web page with just the facts and instructions on how to get involved.  What I haven't really gotten to yet is just a candid discussion of the issue.  So here it is, the "sitting down for a beer with Pete to get his thoughts on Cablecard" post.

I'll start with an analogy.  Do you remember when VCRs were all the rage?  You could go to any electronics store and choose from about fifty different models of VCRs - the four head VCR, the HQ VCR, the black one and the silver one with cool rotating tape graphics.  And then came the innovation stage, where they came up with VCR+ to make it easier to record scheduled shows, downloaded guide data encoded in PBS signals, and even the one that set its own clock.  The point is this - you could choose your own quality from cheap garbage to over-priced nirvana and manufacturers constantly challenged each other to come up with new features.  It was low-tech compared to today's standards, but that was innovation.  Wondering where the analogy comes in?  Well imagine that someone from the cable company went to the store for you, said "I'll take the cheapest one with the worst features" and then forced you to buy that (for a slight markup of course).  Wouldn't that make you mad?  Well in a nutshell, that's the problem right now in Canada - we should have choices, we should have competition creating innovation, we should have products that don't suck.  Instead, the cable companies are telling us "you can have any colour you want so long as it's black."

I suspect that most people put up with it because they don't really know any better.  If you want to get high-def, then you get the high-def box from the satellite or cable company.  And it seems pretty cool when you see that high-def picture for the first time and the first time you pause live TV, but then you start to notice that it doesn't always work right or you have to spend hours with your parents because they can't figure out the awful interface. It's at that point that most people settle with what they've got thinking that it's really the only option.

But it's not the only option.  In the United States, they are using the exact same technologies as us to distribute cable and they have choice (and in my opinion, some pretty cool choices too).  The difference is that in 1996, the FCC recognized the inherent problem of tying television service to a proprietary set top box and mandated that the cable companies work with third-parties who develop devices that would use their high-definition digital signals.  In a compromise that would allow the cable companies to control at least the security aspect of their networks, the cable companies and the FCC eventually settled on a technology called "cablecard".  While any device could then work with the digital cable, the cable companies still encrypt or "scramble" the signal and that signal can only be decrypted when you get a special key from the cable company.  That key is called a cablecard, and it is only given out to work with hardware that has been tested and proven to maintain the security that the cable company requires.  And here we are...

So has cablecard been a resounding success in the United States?  I would say that no it has not.  While the concept is sound, the technology itself has limitations that make it difficult to implement.  Additionally, the cable companies themselves have appeared to be reluctant to extend any reasonable amount of goodwill in getting their end of the compromise, the security card, deployed and running in other people's homes.  But like I said the concept is sound and with must-have gadgets like the Tivo Series 3 driving demand things are getting better.

Am I suggesting that Canada plunge in and adopt Cablecard right away?  Actually no, I have specifically asked that the CRTC direct the cable and satellite companies to investigate existing technologies and report back on the best way to meet the goal of allowing third party devices to connect to their networks.  In reality, this will take several years and I think that it's perfect timing for the Canadian cable companies to jump in and participate in the latter stages of cablecard version 2, which has the potential to solve many of the issues that were discovered by the early v1 adopters in the United States.

But the real win for me in the short term is the other side of my proposal to simply transmit basic cable channels (ie the high definition equivalents of the big broadcast networks) without encryption whatsoever, which alleviates the need for cablecard for the most common cable channels.  If I can get an unencrypted signal in high definition using an antenna, then what possible reason would the companies that own the rights to those channels possibly have for encrypting them?  The content is already available and will continue to be available in its raw form over the air, so the arguments surrounding piracy of that content via the cable networks are moot.  For basic cable, there is absolutely no reason why it can't be sent over the cable in a way that can be displayed on your HDTV today.  The technology is called QAM, it's what everyone is using in North America, and if they'd just stop scrambling/encrypting the signals the all of the thousands of TVs with QAM tuners would simply work.  Just plug in the cable to the TV, turn it on, and watch TV like you've always done.  No set top box, no cablecard, no problems.

Why not go all the way and just stop encrypting all of the channels, including the pay channels?  While that would certainly make this whole problem much simpler to resolve technically, I don't believe that's a reasonable thing for us to expect.  The pay channels provide us content that isn't available anywhere else, and it is unique content that the owners need to protect.  The producers of "Gray's Anatomy" have already made a choice to use the public airwaves to broadcast to as many people as possible, make their money on ad revenue, and accept that their content is available without encryption.  However, the producers of "The Sopranos" have never made that choice and indeed have a business model that lives and dies by the number of people who are paying a fee directly to HBO through the cable companies.  I believe that HBO has a right to protect that content and set the rules by which it is consumed.  If you don't like it, don't buy it.

I've now laid out my case for what I believe is reasonable and right:

• We as consumers should have choice in our consumer electronics and not have it dictated to us by opportunistic cable companies
• We as a society need to continue to foster competition and creativity amongst the makers of these devices
• There is no reason other than opportunism that cable companies would need to encrypt content that is freely available over the air
• We need to respect the need for pay TV content producers to preserve their business model via some form of encryption, namely cablecard or it's future iterations

That's all well and good that I think that, now what am I going to do about it?  Well call me old fashioned, but I really do believe in democracy.  The government isn't a big faceless organization, it's a bunch of guys like you and me who happened to be chosen to represent the will of the people.  They put their pants on one leg at a time, they go to work during the day and they come home in the evening to spend some time with the family and relax in front of the TV.  In essence, the people who can make my vision a reality are living pretty much the same life as me.  My goal is to connect with those people, let them know that there are options out there, and help them to fight on our behalf against the companies who are doing exactly what they're supposed to - maximizing the profits for their shareholders.

There are no bad guys here, just a bunch of people trying to do their jobs the best that they can.  If I can help my team (ie my representatives in government) by providing them with good information and reasonable down-to-earth arguments then I really do believe that we can resolve this little policy oversight.