I've been testing a new method for working around the ATSC limitation in Windows 7 Media Center.  While this method still needs some tweaking, which I'm working with the utility developers to do, I thought it would be useful to get an early version of this tutorial out into the wild since the HDHomerun hack has stopped working in Windows 7 Build 7068.  Basically, in this workaround we will configure Media Center as a US-based system and then re-import the Canadian Media Center guide data back into the system.  It makes me feel better to point out that this would be absolutely unnecessary if Microsoft would just turn on ATSC reception in the Canadian region.  Moving on.

Step 1 - Configure Media Center in Windows 7 for the United States region

Run through the TV Signal Setup wizard and set up all of your tuners as if you were a resident of the United States.  You will make life easier on yourself if you choose a zip code near your location (for example 14072 will automatically set up all of the Buffalo and Toronto ATSC channels).   Upon completion, you should be able to navigate to the guide and tune in all of your channels whether they be ATSC, analog cable, satellite STB, whatever.  You will notice that most if not all of the guide data is wrong for your channels, that's expected at this point.

Step 2 - Download the Canadian listings for your area to a local file

Download the utility MC2XML from http://mc2xml.110mb.com/ and copy it to a directory on your computer.  In this example I've copied it to C:\mc2xml\.  Double-click to run mc2xml.exe, which will launch the configuration page.

Type in your postal code and country code, and until I get some bugs ironed out with the utility developer select "-F chan name first".

Once you hit OK, you'll be asked to select the appropriate lineup for your provider.  Select the one you need, and click OK to continue.

After a minute or so, you'll notice that MC2XML writes two new files out to the hard drive and then closes itself.  The first file, mc2xml.dat is a configuration file that stores your postal code, lineup selection, etc.  so that you don't need to enter it again.  The second is the actual Electronic Program Guide listings stored in the XMLTV format.

Step 3 - Import the listings into Media Center

Download the utility "Big Screen EPG" and copy it to a directory on your computer.  I use the directory c:\bse\.  Since Big Screen EPG is currently in beta, you'll need to request access from the author by sending an email to support@bigscreenglobal.com with the title "EPG Beta Request" and some information about your region and TV sources.

In order to configure the beta version of BSE, you'll need to launch a command window.
Click on Start, then type in the word cmd then hit enter.  The type into the black command prompt window c:\bse\bsetool.exe -config and hit enter.

This will launch the BSE configuration screen, seen below. Click on Add New Provider Wizard.

Click on Next to continue with XMLTV Files from Local System selected

Click on Choose File(s) and select the file c:\mc2xml\xmltv.xml

Click Next to accept the settings.

The utility will scan the file and come back with a list of channels found.  You can leave them all selected, or uncheck any that you don't want to be imported into Media Center.

On the next screen, simply click Next to accept the defaults for now as I haven't done any playing with this logic to see how it impacts the Canadian market.  I suspect that affiliate will be less useful for us given that any one unique program may be broadcast on both Canadian affiliates (Global) and US affiliates (Fox).

You can click Next to accept the default provider key

Your guide provider is now set up, and all that's left here is to import it into Media Center.  Click on Generate MXF and Import to Media Center, which will take a few minutes to complete and given the size of the listings for digital cable providers here in Canada it may look like it's hanging but it's all good. 

After a few minutes, you'll get a popup like the one below.  Simply click on OK to import the data into Media Center.  Again, this will take a few minutes to complete.

Once the data is successfully loaded into Media Center, you can safely close Big Screen EPG.  Note that there are alot of other cool things you can do with Big Screen EPG.  The utility is well documented, and I encourage you to read the included guide (the XPS files in the same directory as bsetool.exe) to tweak your EPG's usefulness.

Step 4 - Assign the new guide data to your channels

Now that we've imported all the correct listings into Media Center, it's time to tell Media Center "No really, I know I said I live in the United States and you think you pulled up the correct listings for my area but the sad truth is that I lied.  Let me teach you which listings REALLY go with every channel.  I'm sorry if this upsets you Mister Media Center, but you really shouldn't be angry with me.  Your rage is much more appropriately directed at your makers.  Yes, I understand that this is a really stupid way to get a perfectly supportable function to work.  It's not my fault."  Or something along those lines.  :-)

Within Media Center, navigate to Settings, TV, Guide, Edit Channels

Next, it's probably easiest to go through the list of channels and disable the channels that you don't have access to.  You can do this by selecting Show Preview on the left-hand menu which will attempt to show you the video of each channel as you navigate to it in the channel list.  If you don't get it (due to your subscription, or reception), then clear the checkbox so that Media Center ignores the channel.

Because I chose a zip code close to me, all of my digital channels are actually correct already.  I'll use the listings for my area from Zap2It.com to determine the correct mapping.  The first channel in my example that is mislabelled is channel 3, which according to Zap2It should really be CICA.  Click on the name next to channel 3 to change the settings for that channel.
 

Next, click on on Edit Listings, and once on that screen you can scroll down to the listings for CICA and click OK to select.  If you have a keyboard, it's much quicker to simply type in the callsign letters (CICA in this case) which will then jump to the correct listing.  Another hint is that you can see a description of what's supposed to be on right now on that channel and compare it to what's playing in the background to verify accuracy.

This will bring you back to the settings page for that channel, where you'll notice that the correct listings are now applied.  Click Save to save the changes.

Which brings you back to the edit channels page.  Continue editing the listings associated with each of your channels, and then click Save.

And voila, now your guide has all the correct information.

Step 5 - Set up an automation schedule

While it might be fun to run through those steps every day or so, it's probably much better to schedule things so that it "just works" automatically.  I've exported my settings to make it easier for you (assuming you used the directory names c:\bse and c:\mc2xml from above).  Click here to download.  This will set your system up to download the listings every day at 3am, and update media center every day at 4am.

Click on the Start Menu and type Task Scheduler followed by Enter to launch the task scheduler.

Click on Import Task. and select the exported file "Import Listings into MC using Big Screen EPG.xml".

Click OK on the Create Task screen (and/or you can modify any of the settings as you see fit).

You will then be prompted for your password, since this task requires user priveleges to run and import guide data into media center.  Use your primary Media Center user name.

Import the file "Get listings via MC2XML" in the same manner.

Congratulations, you now have restored free high-definition over the air reception to your Canadian Media Center!

Additional Notes/Tips:

• This guide will supplement your listings with one data source only, which in my case is fine since my ATSC listings from Buffalo contain all the data I need.  If you need to import more than one data source (for example, you need both cable and satellite listings) you have two options which I haven't yet tested.
  1. Free Option:  Set up two different instances of MC2XML in different directories.  Configure each one to download a different guide, and then configure Big Screen EPG to use two sources with each source pointing to a different MC2XML directory.
  2. Less Free Option:  Get an account with SchedulesDirect for $20 a year.  Through their web interface you can set up which listings are relevent to you, manage the stations you get, and use MC2XML to download all of the lineups at once using its "Schedules Direct" option.
• I'm working with both the MC2XML and Big Screen EPG authors to tweak this, the methods and tools are likely to change before RTM of Windows 7.
• I'm hopeful, albeit sceptical, that Microsoft will come to their senses and simply allow ATSC in Canada out of the box.  I'm also hopeful that someone, maybe even me, will come up with an easier hack in the event that Microsoft lets us down.

At this point I have no reason to believe that Microsoft will be officially supporting ATSC over-the-air high definition broadcasts in Canada, although they fully support it in the United States.  My feelings on that business decision are the subject of another post, in this post we will discuss unsupported workarounds to get ATSC working in Media Center.

First, some background.  Like the United States, Canada has decided to transition all television broadcasts from analog to digital.  These new digital signals have greater effective range, provide a crystal-clear high definition picture, and as with all over the air network TV broadcasts are free and legal to access.  It's worth noting that over the air signals represent the best high-definition picture quality you can get for network television - better than cable and much better than satellite.  While high definition is available for a fee via cable and satellite, those high definition channels are subject to ever-increasing compression and picture quality degradation as they try to squeeze more and more content into your subscription.  And unlike cable and satellite, over the air broadcasts are not encrypted and can be easily incorporated into a Media Center setup, copied over to your iPod, and are generally easy to use.  The United States has nearly completed their digital transition, and will be shutting down the analog broadcasts in February 2009.  Canada is well into its transition, with most major markets now broadcasting in digital and 100% of the country switching over to digital by 2011 before we shut down our analog transmitters.  Here in Toronto, I can get access to every major US and Canadian network in full high-definition glory using a $40 antenna that I put in my attic.

Here's how to get digital high-definition (ATSC) broadcasts into Media Center.

If you're using Media Center in Windows XP or Windows Vista, follow this link for detailed instructions.

If you're using Media Center in Windows 7 or Vista with TV Pack 2008, continue reading below.  I've tried to provide excruciating detail, but don't get scared.  It's not difficult, I'm just going a bit overboard with screenshots and explanation.

Prerequisites:

• You should get a good quality UHF antenna.  In most cases I've read about it comes down to a Channel Master 4221 or Channel Master 4228 depending on your distance from the transmitters.  Consult this handy chart (PDF) to select the right antenna for your area.  I personally have a 4221 in my attic which was both easy to do and very neighbour-friendly.
• You will need an ATSC tuner for your Media Center PC.  At this time, the only tuner whose drivers support this Windows 7 workaround is the HDHomerun.
• Neither of these items are the sort of thing you can walk into WalMart and find on the shelves, but there are several online vendors including eBay sellers who carry these items.  I personally have purchased from Sensuz, a Toronto-area HTPC dealer, and have been very happy with their service.

Step 1 - Install and Configure the HDHomerun

You can put the HDHomerun anywhere in your house that has both a connection to the antenna, and a connection to your network.  Personally, I have my router and my antenna connections in the basement near the electrical panel, so that's where I chose to install the HDHomerun as well.  The HDHomerun contains two tuners, so you'll need to use a good-quality splitter from your antenna cable which then you can use to connect the included coax cables to the tuner.  Insert your network cable into the tuner, plug in the power adapter, and that should be the last time you touch the tuner.

The rest of the setup is now done on your Media Center PC.  Download and install the latest beta drivers for the HDHomerun from the SiliconDust website by clicking here.  When the HDHomeRun Setup program launches select "Canada" as your country and enter your postal code, then click "Next".

Change source to "Digital Antenna" for both tuners (Windows Media Center should automatically get selected as the application), then click "Next".
 

Click on "Scan" and let the HDHomeRun discover all of your local ATSC channels.  Once all the channels are found, click on "Finish".  You've now completed setup of the tuner and drivers.

Step 2 - Configure Media Center to use the HDHomeRun tuner

Since Media Center doesn't allow ATSC tuners to be used in Canada, the HDHomeRun drivers fool Media Center into detecting it as a QAM digital cable tuner (which is supported).  I'll walk you through the setup of the tuner in Media Center.  Launch Media Center and navigate to Settings, TV, Setup TV Signal.  We want to set up Media Center using the correct region, Canada.  If Media Center doesn't automatically detect that you're in Canada, be sure to select a different region and choose "Canada".

Enter your postal code, and agree to the terms of service (assuming you do indeed agree to the legaleze).

If Media Center doesn't automatically detect your tuners (remember, this is beta software still) then you can manually configure the tuner.

Select the cable provider that most closely matches the ATSC lineup in your area (be sure to choose a provider that has HD service, that will make life easier for you later as we set up the guide).

Next, Media Center will scan for ATSC channels.  This process took awhile for me, up to fifteen minutes. 

Congratulations, your tuner is now set up!  However at this point, you likely won't have any guide listings associated with the channels that were detected via the scan.
 

Step 3 - Map guide listings to your ATSC channels

For those of you who have used the Vista hack, you may like me be a little surprised by the way the guide works now.  For each channel on each tuner you can specify which guide listings should be used, which is incredibly flexible.  Media Center also now has some much-welcomed logic in the Advanced Record Settings that allows you to specify that any given recording should be recorded in HD Only, HD Preferred, SD Only, or SD Preferred.  Because of this feature, I personally would recommend that you always attempt to associate your high-definition ATSC channels with listings from your cable company's high-definition channel lineup so that the recording logic works properly.  I'll walk you through how to set that up. 

First, navigate to Settings, TV, Guide.

Select the first channel that you want to work with by clicking on the callsign of the station.

In the settings page for the channel, click on "Edit Listings"

You'll now be taken to a list of all the channels that your Media Center is aware of (including channels that were set up via other sources, such as Analog Antenna or Satellite if you have those are part of your setup).  This list is organized alphabetically, and you can type in letters to skip to the appropriate point in the list.  Select a channel with HD listings.

If you select a channel that also comes in via some other source (for example you get CBC Toronto on both cable and antenna) you will be presented with the option to merge the guide listings or to copy the listings.  Select "copy" so that you can manage the ATSC channel independently.  Once you've selected the correct listings, you'll now see that the listings are associated with the ATSC channel.  Click Save.

The first example was an easy one, because my local cable company happens to carry CBC Toronto in high definition.  I wasn't so lucky with the Buffalo-based stations, as Cogeco carries the US network feeds from Detroit instead.  This forces you into a choice:  either select local listings which are not in high definition and lose some of that "HD Preferred" logic I discussed earlier, or select a high definition channel from the same network that may not have the exact local listings for your area.  For me, I mostly care about primetime high definition content, so I chose to just use the Detroit guide listings.  Let's set up my local NBC affiliate, WGRZ.  Select WGRZ and the click on "Edit Listings".
 

I scrolled down to the W section of the guide listings and scanned for other listings that were labelled "NBC Affiliate".  I did a quick google search to verify that this channel was in the same time zone as me, and then selected these listings.

I also chose to rename this channel to "NBC - HD" as somewhat of a visual reminder to me that the guide listings are only valid for the network, not necessarily the local station.

Click on save, and at this point you can keep assigning channels or you may choose to go to the guide and test things out before continuing.  Once you assign guide listings to all of your ATSC channels, you're done the setup and should be able to enjoy pristine high-definition recordings on your computer and throughout your home on your extenders.
 

Just for kicks, I decided to take screenshots of the new Advanced Record options for HD Only and HD Preferred so you can see what I was talking about earlier.

 Questions and Answers

I'll try to capture some key answers that come in over time here in this section.  To kick things off, here are some things that came to mind for me.

What happens if I select "Merge" instead of "Copy"?
I've found that by selecting merge, Media Center assumes that all sources for a given channel are standard definition.

Doesn't Media Center support Analog Antenna in Canada, and can't I use those guide listings?
Yes analog antenna is supported and you'll get the listings for your local channels, but because it's analog Media Center will assume that all channels that use these guide listings are standard definition.

But isn't it incredibly stupid to support Analog Antenna but not Digital Antenna, given that analog channels are all shutting down and digital is the government-mandated standard for all of North America?
Yes.

Media Center didn't automatically detect all of the channels that were detected by the HDHomeRun, is there any way I can manually add them?
I personally had this problem with CFTO here in Toronto.  I manually added the channel by navigating to Settings, TV, Guide, Add Missing Channels, Add QAM Channel.  I then entered in the channel number noted in the Guide Number column from the HDHomeRun setup utility (9.1 in this case) and it worked fine from that point forward in Media Center.

Those who know me closely know that I've pretty much given up on Media Center as a PVR platform for Canada.  Despite a fairly obvious and technically simple opportunity to support ATSC high-definition over the air broadcasts in Canada, Microsoft has chosen to ignore this market.  I've given up, I've stopped contributing, and I'm no longer a Media Center MVP.

Over the holidays I had time to reflect on my options, and started giving alternatives some serious consideration.  I've been lobbying my cable company on the business merits of ClearQAM as a distribution advantage over satellite using native HDTV tuners ("just plug it in and it works"), I've been looking at hardware alternatives, and I've been giving some serious play-time to SageTV.

Maybe it was the eggnog, or maybe it was just the opportunity to have a clear mind for a couple weeks, but I think I've come up with a solution that could very well get me excited about Media Center again.  Follow my logic:

• Before QAM was supported in MCE, tuner manufacturers spoofed their drivers to look like ATSC which is a similar but supported tuner type in Media Center
• In TVPack and Windows 7, QAM is now fully supported even in Canada.
• Given the similarities between QAM and ATSC, I see no roadblocks to reversing the spoof.  Make ATSC tuners appear to Media Center as if they are QAM tuners.
• Map the QAM channels that Media Center finds via scanning (which are really ATSC channels) to guide listings.
• Bing, bang, boom - ATSC works in Canada.

I did some playing myself, but came to the conclusion that I wouldn't be able to do this on my own.  I was hoping that I could either build some sort of generic gateway BDA driver that would pass QAM tuning and stream requests off to another BDA ATSC driver, but that's over my head.  I tried playing with drivers in the WDK to change what they report themselves as, but again that was over my head.  Finally, I decided to make my case to a few contacts that I have with tuner manufacturers and see who might be willing to help.

Based on some early emails and chatter on the forums, it looks like I've had some success with SiliconDust, the maker of the HDHomerun tuner and pioneers in providing QAM support in Media Center before Microsoft officially supported it.  I am THRILLED that they're taking a look at this, and will do whatever I personally can to help ensure their financial success here in the Canadian market if this approach turns out to be fruitful.

How can you help:

• If this is something that is interesting to you, please let me know by posting a comment
• If this approach would cause you to go out and buy a HDHomerun device, please let SiliconDust know by shooting them an email with your support and intent to buy (support@silicondust.com)
• If you are technical enough to be able to write a generic BDA driver that converts QAM requests to ATSC request, please let me know in the comments

With any luck, this will get Media Center working again in Canada and allow us to take advantage of the proliferation of free over the air high definition signals that are popping up here as a result of the Canadian Analog shutdown in 2011.

In my attic, I have mounted two Channel Master 4221 antennas that drive my high-definition Media Center PVR.  Based on advice from people on various forums, I have always kept my antennas pointed in the same direction (I decided to mount two in an attempt to improve long-distance reception).  At first, they were pointed towards Buffalo since the Toronto stations weren't fully rolled out yet.  Earlier this year, I hauled myself up into the attic and pointed the antennas towards Toronto with its now almost complete coverage of broadcast television in OTA High Definition.  However I've found that there are still some scenarios where I need to record from Buffalo stations, and the reliability of doing so has really suffered this TV season.

One might ask - if you have two antennas, why not point one at Buffalo and the other at Toronto?  I've resisted doing so to this point because combining those signals may actually cause things to get worse.  Take for example Fox Buffalo (WUTV).  If I get a weak signal from Buffalo and then combine that with static from Toronto, then the sum of those two signals is an even weaker signal for WUTV.  Similarly, a strong signal from CTV in Toronto combined with static from Buffalo combines to provide an overall weaker signal for that channel.  That's the theory anyways.

In practice the angle difference between Toronto and Buffalo is less that 90 degrees, so what I get is a combination of an excellent signal with a good signal and I would hope the combination could pull in a "pretty good" signal from both directions.  So I hauled my large frame through the tiny hole in the closet up into the attic to play around again.  I brought my laptop, a USB ATSC tuner, and a copy of TSReader to check on signal quality in real-time while I adjusted the antenna directions.  After about an hour of play, I stepped away from the setup with a good lock on every single station from Toronto, Buffalo, and Hamilton.  On Sunday anyways, this would appear to support my theory of getting a "pretty good" signal all around.  However only time will tell, as atmospheric conditions vary from season to season and even day to day, whether I've been able to realize my goal of consistent signal quality from all of the major transmission locales in my area.

For those of you who obtained "early access" to TV Pack 2008 for Windows Vista aka Fiji, you may have noticed that my previously published hack to enable ATSC in Canada no longer works.  I've spent a significant amount of time working on this problem, both from the technical angle and via my contacts at Microsoft to see what could be done about it.

Here's the bottom line:  ATSC will not work in Canada with TV Pack 2008 for Windows Vista.

In the past, Media Center would check at setup time for the capabilities of your region and write out these values to the registry accordingly.  I leveraged this mechanism to "fool" Media Center into thinking that it was capable of tuning in ATSC in Canada.  Of course it doesn't take much fooling since ATSC in Canada and the US work exactly the same and there is no technical reason why it shouldn't "just work".  But I digress...

With TV Pack 2008, the capabilities for your region are re-checked every time you download a guide update.  Not only are the capabilities updated every day, but they're no longer stored in the registry and are instead stored in the common MCE database along with the guide and other key data.  As you can probably guess, the capabilities for Canada are set to ATSC = false.  The good news about this new method is that theoretically Microsoft could choose to enable ATSC capabilities at any time (although I have no reason to believe that this will be the case).  The bad news is that it makes hacking the capability in before they choose to officially support it becomes very difficult, or at least beyond my technical capabilities.

So what would I recommend?

• For anyone using MCE in Vista right now with the ATSC hack, steer clear of TV Pack 2008.
• For anyone with a few programming skills, I suggest the following as the next areas of investigation:
  • Figure out the database format that is being used and write a service to overwrite the capabilities on a daily basis
  • Figure out a way to proxy the guide updates and flip the ATSC capability bit from "false" to "true"

As for how this makes you feel about Microsoft's commitment to Canada, I'll post a separate blog entry on that.  What I can say is that I am 100% sure that nobody at Microsoft went out of their way to actively break ATSC in Canada.  Breaking the hack was very much an unintentional consequence of what appears to be an otherwise sound design change to the way that Media Center handles setup.  However there is clearly a business decision that was made to not support ATSC in Canada despite the relative technical ease of making that happen.  Given that like the US, Canada is shutting down analog broadcast toute suite in favour of ATSC one has to wonder why this feature request has languished for so long.

Ian Dixon published his weekly media center podcast today, which includes an interview with your truly to discuss drop the box and the general situation with digital cable here in Canada.

Click here to listen to the interview:  http://thedigitallifestyle.com/cs/blogs/podcast/archive/2007/10/03/the-media-center-show-125-real-world-1.aspx

Jade from Calgary has set up a facebook group for drop the box.  If you're a facebooky kind of person, you can add yourself to the group at the following link.  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5122168590

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.