Is this a good idea?

[BillyT]

Please vote whether or not you think this is a good idea and if not, please state why.

Recently I had a thought that the "Plug and Play" rules created by the FCC for cable television are good for the consumer. No one can doubt that the standardization provided by cable cards (thanks to Cable Labs) is great for us consumers.

Therefore, I think that the DBS satellite providers should be forced to create a similar Satcard which conforms to the same standards created by Cable Labs (in terms of form factor, communication protocol(s), etc). There is no reason it couldn't be easily done from a technology perspective and a smart card could still be used, if necessary, which plugs into the Satcard for authentication of DBS satellite services.

This would be great from a consumer perspective as it would make it so that a third-party company (such as TIVO, Replay or any other company for that matter) could create a digital video recorder which can easily accept source material from both cable television and DBS satellite services using existing Cablecard ports.

So, my question is this. Would it be worth having a "Petition for Rulemaking" regarding this suggestion drafted and submitted to the FCC for review?

 

[Pepper]

Technically this is not feasible. The digital cable decoder included in "cablecard ready" sets is a whole lot less complicated than a DBS receiver which must support DSS (DirecTV), DVB-MPEG2 and DVB-MPEG4 (Dish) as well as the legacy, DishPro, and DirecTV multi-LNB configurations.

 

[BillyT]

The way that I'm envisioning this is that DirecTV would provide their own card which would reveive DirecTV programming and DISH Network their own. It might not be feasible, but I know it is possible; even if expensive to build at first. Any other reasons why not?

 

[DishSatUser]

I think something is needed in order to compete with this!

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2662

You can now tune HD TV premium and PPV content directly with your WIndows Vista HTPC. All new hights for a media center system that is customizable for the customer.

Sure we don't need necessarily a new "standard", but at least a solution from each provider that allows Vista HTPC's to also take advantage of Sat. One more reason for someone to stick with cable in my opinion because even the top end HD DVR's from each vendor suck in comparsion to the flexibility that will be available to a card that can be added to an HTPC and adapted to the customers needs.