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Eventually, the moment came. I’ve always found that no matter what Great Event is bearing down upon me, it never hits me until the last minute, until it is impossible for me not to think about it. I think this is probably because of my tendency to insulate myself; I so dislike unhappiness that I will not think about unpleasant things until they force themselves upon me.

When it comes time to face the unhappiness, however, I find a way to enjoy it. Perverse enjoyment perhaps. It all comes, I sincerely believe, from my interest in and love for movies and all things cinematic; even though I have abandoned (for the time being, anyway) my early desire to be a filmmaker, I still think in cinematic terms, and I always imagine my life to be the storyline of a movie. From this I get a flair for the melodramatic. I demonstrated this as I left Carowinds for the last time.

I worked at the Carowinds theme park for six years, starting during my senior year in high school. I spent my first summer on the parking lot crew; but for the five years after that I worked in the Rides Department. It was hot, physically exhausting, and monotonous work; my supervisors were often arbitrary and sometimes incompetent. But Carowinds also defined a large part of my world for those six years. I met Lynn there, and it was through many hours of working together that we got to know one another. Carowinds was the fire in which our relationship was forged.

It was, of course, just a job. Like all formative experiences, it was important not because of what it was, but because of when it was. My time at Carowinds spanned one of the most important intervals in my life: my entire undergraduate college career, and the whole of my courtship with Lynn. I started working there as a school kid, and I left as an adult.

It had started as a childhood fantasy: for a kid, the idea of working at Carowinds seemed like a dream. You didn’t think about changing trash cans or cleaning restrooms, or about hours of stupefying boredom. You just thought about getting to run the rides. And for me, it was more specific than that: I wanted to operate the White Lightnin’ roller coaster, and make the dramatic “Lightning strikes now!” announcement – part of the standard “spiel” that preceded each launch of the train.

Lots of people have left Carowinds forever, and many of them have been long-time employees. But when it’s time to leave, they just leave. Not me: I had to do it in an appropriate manner for my audience, in an appropriately cinematic style. (Someday I might make a movie of this, and I didn’t want to have to exaggerate.)

So first, after I had gathered my cache of going-away gifts from the crew, I had to do it one last time. The childhood dream which now was over, I had to relive – one for the movie, you know. I stepped up into the dispatch booth. “Excuse me, Megan,” I said, edging her away from the control panel. “I’ve got to shoot the train one last time, for old times’ sake.”

“Oh, you’re going to get sentimental,” she said, and graciously gave up the controls to me.

I started my Rides career at the bumper cars, where (after a year) I was promoted to supervisor. But I was a lousy supervisor, and the management was not prepared to put me in charge of a high-profile ride like a roller coaster. For three years I toiled away at less prestigious assignments, all the while figuring out how to be responsible and reliable.

The ridiculous truth is that I learned much of what I know about succeeding in the workplace from my years at Carowinds. I learned how to motivate a team and keep up their morale; I learned how to organize and schedule; and I learned how to keep one’s boss happy. My efforts were finally rewarded in 1988, when I was given custody of White Lightnin’ during its last year at the park.

The train rumbled into the station for what would be my last time. I tried to take in every detail. I took a breath, and I swear, my eyes began to tear.

The train stopped. I began the series of button-pushing and spiel announcements that had become completely automatic, but this time I concentrated and savored every syllable.

“For those of you now boarding, welcome to White Lightnin’. Please pull your lap bar securely to your waist, and secure any and all loose and valuable items. Carowinds is not responsible for anything lost or held during this ride.”

It was a great summer, the best of my Carowinds career. My crew was happy and efficient; I knew my job well, and my superiors trusted me. And, of course, I got my chance to say “Lightning strikes now!” countless times (sometimes using different voices or accents to keep it interesting). It was my ride, and I had earned it.

But 1988 was also my last year there. Engaged to be married that summer, I knew that seasonal employment would no longer be sufficient. And so it was with genuine sadness that I gave my notice in June, and began training my assistant to replace me. Those final weeks were strange: I’d trained a competent crew, and as I gradually stepped aside I got to see for myself that they were going to do fine without me. When my last shift ended on July 24, 1988, the only thing left for me to do was to leave.

I had planned this sentimental farewell to the ride, and had thought about how I would do it. My mother asked me later if I had told those on the train that this was my last time ever to operate the ride. But that wasn’t what I wanted to do: this was a private moment for me. I wanted to sharpen my memory of what it was like to drive this ride by doing it one last time and paying attention to every detail. And it had to be the real thing. It couldn’t be a farewell speech, and it couldn’t be a creative spiel with funny voices or German accents. This had to be by the book.

“Please remain seated at all times and keep your arms and legs inside the train throughout the ride.” The seriousness and longing in my voice must have begun to come through: Megan said “aww…” behind me. I was almost finished.

“Place your head against the headrest and your hands on the handrail in front of you,” I said. My finger trembled on the button.

Sometimes I thought about writing a detailed account of my time at Carowinds; I’d known a lot of interesting people there, and those six years had been filled with drama and soap-opera subplots (my romance with Lynn at center stage, of course). I did write some reminiscences, which someday I’ll pull together into a coherent narrative; but it wasn’t until the very end that I felt motivated to record a specific scene in complete detail. Half a year before I officially started keeping a journal, I wrote an account of my final moments of Carowinds employment: events that took place on an afternoon twenty years ago today.

I had said this last sentence, the ultimate catch phrase of Carowinds spiels, in so many different voices and intonations that I thought there were no new ones left. But never before had I given it the reading I gave it this time.

I took a breath. “Lightning strikes now.”

I pressed the button, and both the train and I were gone.

Alfa’s impression of a dog who has fallen from a tall building:

Sunday 25 June 1989
1:40 AM
Kingswood Apartments, Chapel Hill

I really should be going to bed, but I’ve just had a remarkable experience — so bizarre that it would be easy to believe that this journal entry is entirely fictional.

I spent much of Saturday afternoon fiddling around with the computer. I think I’ve finally got Telix working correctly, so I visited several of the local BBSs, reading the FidoNet echoes and exploring the download libraries. I’ve already installed PC-Write, which I hope to use for writing papers in grad school, and Pat has told me about several other shareware programs that I’d like to try.

But after supper I decided to spend some time working on my latest musical project, a song called “Sun Behind The Clouds,” which I started writing more than a year ago (before we were married). It has developed into one of the most complex recordings I’ve ever attempted, with as many as ten parts (depending on how you count them) packed onto four tracks. But after struggling with it for several days, I’d started to think I had been overly ambitious.

I had just finished rerecording the second guitar part (again) when I heard someone behind me. I thought Lynn had come out of the bedroom, but when I turned around I was stunned to see a guy I did not at first recognize — and then I did. The visitor was me: his face was thinner and more lined, he had no moustache, and he wore strangely small, rimless glasses, but it was me. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and had what looked like a pair of Walkman headphones around his neck, the wire trailing into his pocket.

“Don’t freak out,” he said as soon as he saw me.

I’ll admit that I had been considering it, but I decided to maintain my dignity. “Keep it down,” I said, nodding toward the bedroom. “Lynn’s asleep.”

“Right,” he whispered, looking around. “I forgot how small this place was.”

“It’s cheap,” I said. “So what year are you from?” The question seemed to surprise him. “Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m not an idiot. You’ve seen all the same science-fiction movies I have. I know time travel when I see it.”

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I’m from 2008 … just under two decades from now, assuming I hit the right date. Working at Overby, right? About to start grad school? Dad’s heart bypass? DOS 4.0?”

“Sounds about right,” I said. “I guess DOS is a thing of the past for you, huh? I imagine it’s been replaced by OS/2 or something.”

He laughed. “Or something, yeah. Multiple somethings, actually, if you include people like Ben.”

Ben? “Uhh … if you say so,” I said. “I haven’t spent a lot of time with Ben yet, but I’m not sure he knows much about computers. He drools a lot.”

The other Bob wasn’t really listening. He was looking past me at my studio setup — the Mirage on the folding table, the Shure microphone clamped to a chemistry-lab stand, and of course the Tascam multitrack deck. “I still have that,” he said, pointing at the Tascam. “The Ministudio Porta One. It doesn’t work anymore, but I hung onto it for sentimental reasons. I hauled it out of the attic a couple of years ago to take some pictures for an album cover. I don’t know how I ever managed with just four tracks, but I guess it does the job, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not tonight, anyway.”

“What are you working on?” he asked, peering at the fader settings.

“‘Sun Behind The Clouds,’” I said, watching for his reaction. Would he remember the song as a notable failure? “I thought I had it all worked out, but the vocals didn’t work, and by the time I figured that out there weren’t enough free tracks to rerecord all of the harmonies. I tried sacrificing the second guitar part to rerecord the lead vocal, and then I bounced that back to the original vocal track along with a live harmony vocal, and then I redid the guitar part. But now it’s just two-part harmony, and …” I stopped. He probably already knew all of this.

But he was smiling, and digging in his pocket. “I want you to hear something.” He pulled out a tiny device into which his headphones were plugged — it was about the size of a small calculator, but with a bigger display; I assume it was some sort of Walkman, although it was too small to accommodate a cassette. I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing it played some small disc format, or maybe even digital audio stored in memory. He handed me the headphones, and I slipped them on.

He pressed a button, and I immediately heard the guitar intro of “Sun Behind The Clouds,” but clearer, brighter, more alive somehow. The lead guitar sounded different, but I could tell it was the same performance I’d just recorded. The mix was more spacious, with rich echo effects on the vocals. *This* was what I was going for. There were still flaws, sure, but this was the song I’d heard in my head, the song I’d been trying to get on tape for days.

I pulled the headphones off. “I don’t get it,” I said. “It sounds great, but why are you playing me this?”

“I just wanted you to know that eventually, you’re going to get that song to sound like what you imagined,” he said. “It’s just going to take some time.”

“How long?” I asked.

“I just finished it,” he said, and vanished.

I sat there for a minute and then turned to face the studio setup. I had no idea how to even approximate the mix I’d just heard, but at least now I knew it was possible. Or would someday be possible.

I turned off the Porta One. I’ll come back to the song later.

During the last month or so, I’ve finally resumed steady work on restoring and remixing my old music, continuing the project that produced the Pinckney 4-4 CD two years ago. (Two years? How did I let this project languish for two years?) I’ve completed rough mixes of all the tracks for the second volume, a collection of tracks that covers mid-1986 through early 1988.

This time I decided to try using Adobe Audition rather than Cakewalk SONAR for the remixing and editing. SONAR is a better tool for audio production when MIDI sequencing is required, but in this case I’m working strictly with audio recordings, which is where Audition shines. I’ve been able to do some restoration and enhancement of some of the old recordings that seems almost miraculous to me, in several cases accomplishing things I would have thought impossible (and probably were indeed impossible) when I originally made the recordings.

I’ve realized something else, though, that’s a bit troubling. To help figure out where to end Volume Two, I’ve done a quick survey of the candidate tracks for Volume Three, just to make sure I’m leaving an appropriate quantity of material for the follow-on release. Quantity doesn’t seem to be a problem; but for the first time, I’ve realized that the quality of my musical work (in my opinion, of course) had an early peak during 1986 and 1987. That’s good news for this collection, of course; but it means that Volume Three, when I get to it, might be a somewhat lackluster affair.

I’m not sure exactly why that’s so, but I suspect several factors. An obvious one is that mid-1988 is when I got married and had to get a real job, and consequently I had far less time and energy to work on music (a situation that has persisted to this day). Another was a change of direction: in 1988 I acquired my first electric guitar, and naturally I started using more guitars in my musical work. But I was a complete novice on that instrument, poorly equipped both literally and figuratively; by shifting my focus from the Ensoniq Mirage keyboard, an instrument I’d mastered pretty well, I was taking something of a step backward.

Well, it may be that Volume Three, when it finally appears, will have more of an “odds-and-ends” quality to it. But for now that’s still in the future, and I need to finish my work on Volume Two (I have a couple of possible titles in mind, but I haven’t decided on one just yet).

I also need to decide how to make it available, since CDs are starting to feel distinctly Twentieth Century to me. I’ll certainly still make a CD version available for those who want it, but I’d like to make it available in a downloadable form as well. Since this project is of interest only to me and my two or three actual fans, I think I can handle the bandwidth.

We just had a brief but intense storm pass through here:

The hail lasted for less than a minute. According to the news, more (and larger) hail fell not far from here, closer to downtown Pittsboro; we apparently got only a glancing blow.

Continuing my essay on the regulatory and technological issues connected with bidirectional cable services and third-party devices like high-definition TiVos…

Dueling proposals

Because the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) had been unable to reach an agreement on a standard for bidirectional services, the CableCARD 1.0 specification was limited to “unidirectional cable products” (UDCPs). But even after the adoption of that specification, the negotiations didn’t stop; the NCTA and the CEA kept trying (without success) to negotiate a follow-on standard that would encompass bidirectional services.

Meanwhile, CableCARD 1.0 and UDCPs proved to be less than a spectacular success in the marketplace. As of late 2007, CableCARD-based UDCPs numbered only in the hundreds of thousands nationwide, out of tens of millions of cable subscribers. It seemed that consumers found UDCPs less than compelling, and one possible explanation was that they actually did care about interactive services after all.

With the February 2009 digital-TV transition on the horizon, the FCC wanted to resolve these issues so consumers could buy new digital TVs and be sure they would work as expected. In lieu of a negotiated agreement, in late 2005 the FCC asked the NCTA and the CEA to submit separate proposals for a bidirectional standard.

The NCTA was first to respond. Their proposal was a framework called OpenCable, and specifically a technology called the OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP). OCAP is a Java-based middleware layer intended to make applications portable from one cable system to another. Rather than standardizing the protocols used by cable companies to provide interactive services, OCAP provides a translation layer: a standard set of interfaces that smooths out the differences between different proprietary systems.

Under this system, an application like a cable company’s VOD ordering interface would not access the underlying bidirectional protocols directly; instead, it would be developed for the OCAP platform, which would handle all of the low-level interactions. These cable-company OCAP applications would run on any OCAP device – not only on the cable company’s own STBs, but also on third-party devices that conformed to the OCAP specification. In a sense, OCAP defined a virtual STB, a sort of “box within a box” running inside a TV or DVR.

The CEA followed with a very different proposal of their own, a scheme that came to be known as “Digital Cable Ready Plus” (DCR+). Rather than abstracting interactive services through a middleware layer, DCR+ called for a set of standardized interfaces for direct access to those services. They presented this idea as an incremental development of existing standards, essentially adding two-way interfaces to the existing CableCARD 1.0 specification. Rather than using the OCAP middleware to run the cable-company’s interactive applications, a third-party box would run its own applications that used the standard DCR+ interfaces to access interactive services directly.

Having received these two proposals, in June 2007 the FCC publicly solicited comments about their relative merits. There followed a debate carried on in FCC filings, letters, and meetings, a debate that showed clearly how sharply divided the NCTA and the CEA had become.

The case for DCR+

Although the CEA accepted the idea of OCAP for certain high-end interactive services, they felt that it was too heavyweight a solution for low-end devices that required only what they called “basic interactive services.” It should be possible, they argued, to build low-end devices that accessed interactive services like VOD through DCR+, while still having the option of including OCAP for more “advanced” services like games and e-mail.

They also criticized OCAP for limiting the ability of third-party manufacturers to innovate. If every box ran the same cable-company applications and user interface, they argued, how could a third-party device differentiate itself from a cable-company DVR? In an August 2007 filing, TiVo suggested that under such a regime, there would be no point in building a third-party device at all:

[The FCC] must make absolutely clear that CE manufacturers are permitted to build bidirectional cable devices that use the CE manufacturer’s own user interface to display cable programming signals. A standard that ensures such freedom for CE manufacturers with respect to user interfaces would ensure that consumers see the benefit of competitive devices with respect to their functionality and not simply their brand and price. Moreover, without the freedom to design their own user interface, companies like TiVo that have established brand loyalty in large measure because of a superior user interface would be unlikely to build a navigation device with a user interface that did not meet its high standards of usability or did not do justice to its brand image.

Through OCAP, the CEA argued, cable companies would retain too much control over the software and the user interface, which would be inseparable from the services themselves. DCR+, on the other hand, would permit more differentiation between products and freer competition. But they did acknowledge, almost parenthetically, that its implementation “would require some additional development to standardize formats.”

The case for OCAP

The NCTA, for its part, responded to the CEA’s proposal with a filing that pulled no punches:

Some call this the “DCR-plus” solution; it is more aptly called the “consumer-minus” solution…. [T]he CEA DCR+ proposal would disappoint, confuse, and frustrate cable customers…. The DCR+ device would be instantly archaic, unable to receive all of the interactive services offered today by the cable operator, and disabled from accessing new services. Moreover, that solution, while promoted by some CE companies as a whisper away from current standards, is purely vaporware.

Perhaps the strongest criticism of DCR+ was its requirement that existing interactive services offered by cable companies across the nation would all need to be reengineered to conform to the new specifications, all at the expense of the cable industry. “For this,” the NCTA wrote, “CE offers absolutely no assurance (let alone any FCC requirement) that any CE company would ever build a ‘DCR+’ device – or that any consumer would want one if it were built.”

The problem was that the cable industry had not stood still in the years since the approval of the CableCARD 1.0 spec. They had continued developing and deploying new interactive services like VOD and SDV, but with no standard for bidirectional services. DCR+, they argued, “discards all of cable’s work and requires the rapid re-creation, development and deployment of many new inventions” – just so the CE manufacturers would have the option of building devices without OCAP.

Such a process would take years, they argued, leaving no possibility that new bidirectional devices could reach the market in time for the holiday 2008 season (the FCC’s stated goal). In the meantime, all current cable services would have to be frozen in place, awaiting the approval of the new standards; and all subsequent innovation would be slowed by a new standards process. The proposal, wrote the NCTA, was “breathtaking in its intrusiveness into the marketplace.”

The NCTA summed up their position in no uncertain terms:

[T]he CEA proposal offers not even the slightest hope of serving the broadcast digital transition…. CEA still offers no functional specifications, no standards, no intellectual property clearances, no prototypes, and no firm and enforceable commitment by any CE company to build anything that would meet the DCR+ concept. CEA’s proposal is a lobbying tract, not a practical solution.

The NCTA painted a very different picture of OCAP. The OpenCable platform, they explained, was not a mere proposal, not vaporware, but proven technology. Rather than waiting for the FCC to approve OCAP as a standard, the cable industry had already spent years developing and deploying OpenCable and OCAP devices for their own use, and had even licensed OCAP to some third-party consumer electronics manufacturers. More than 100,000 STBs running OCAP were already in the hands of consumers, they said, and major CE manufacturers like Samsung and Panasonic were already bringing OCAP-enabled devices to market.

The NCTA specifically responded to TiVo’s criticisms, saying that TiVo had displayed a “profound misunderstanding” of OCAP. In particular, they emphasized that OCAP was no barrier to innovation by third-party devices, nor did it preclude the use of a TiVo user interface in addition to the “cable experience”:

Manufacturers differentiate their products through a wide variety of features, resources, processing speed, etc. OpenCable adds one more feature to such devices. It does not remove their differentiation.

And in partial response to the CEA’s wish to build “low-end” devices that did not access advanced interactive services, the NCTA positioned the proposed tuning resolver as a way to enable SDV for current UDCPs (like high-definition TiVos). All of this, the NCTA said, could be accomplished in time for the digital-TV transition; but imposition of a standard like DCR+ would make that deadline impossible to meet.

Where we are

With the digital TV transition less than a year away, the FCC still has given no hints about which way it might go. But in the meantime, however, OCAP has continued to make headway.

In particular, TiVo reversed its position. In late 2007, TiVo notified the FCC that in addition to working on the tuning resolver, they had also obtained from the NCTA certain “clarifications or adjustments” to OCAP, and now believed that they could build “a viable retail DVR with OCAP.” Breaking with the CEA, TiVo now offered its endorsement:

We also expressed our belief that this refined version of OCAP was a preferable solution to DCR+ for a variety of reasons, including time-to-market and the ability to received all of cable’s two-way services. Manufacturers, cable companies, and consumers will benefit most from an OCAP-based solution that enables the creation of differentiated retail devices such as TiVo DVRs and allows all of cable’s two-way services to reach the consumer within a reasonable time. In contrast, a DCR+-based solution would take longer to implement and result in devices with more limited functionality that would not enjoy the full support of the cable industry.

TiVo has not announced specific plans for what might become “TiVo Series 4,” but officials have stated publicly that they are actively developing a box using OCAP (now also known as “tru2way,” the cable industry’s new brand name for the OpenCable platform). The OCAP-based TiVo would have two modes: a “TiVo mode,” offering the familiar TiVo user interface and functions (plus SDV compatibility); and a “cable mode,” offering the cable user-interface and access to advanced bidirectional services.

Decisions

And so this is the situation faced by anyone considering a high-definition TiVo in mid-2008. What should one do? I can offer only my opinion.

It is undeniable that today’s CableCARD-based TiVos (the TiVo Series 3 and the TiVo HD) occupy an uncomfortable position between the limited UDCP standard and whatever comes next. No TiVo can access interactive cable services; while that might not matter so much if you don’t care about VOD or PPV, it does matter if your cable company is using SDV.

But the tuning resolver is on the way. It’s anyone’s guess exactly when this device will become available (at the moment, all we have to go on is the original projection of mid-2008). But the tuning resolver is part of the NCTA’s OCAP proposal (though not part of OCAP itself), and represents part of its strategy to demonstrate that it can deploy real solutions in a timely manner. The cable industry and TiVo both have a lot at stake, so it seems reasonably certain that they will deliver. If channels go dark in the meantime because of SDV, that will be annoying, but temporary.

On the other hand, the still-mythical TiVo Series 4 will need no tuning resolver to access SDV channels, and it will also be able to access all of the other interactive services offered by cable companies. We don’t know when such a box might reach the market, but when it does, it will render today’s HD TiVos obsolete.

In the meantime, we wait for a decision from the FCC, which is currently headed by a chairman who is generally regarded as hostile to the cable industry. What will the FCC decide?

I wouldn’t want to guess. But while I claim no expertise, I must admit I find myself largely persuaded by the NCTA’s deconstruction of DCR+; while OCAP is far from ideal, it may be the best we can hope for given the current realities. The fact that TiVo, initially a critic, has now joined the OCAP camp also reassures me that it can be made to work.

While it’s impossible to say what the FCC might decide, I can’t help wondering if it really matters. In the absence of FCC-mandated standards for bidirectional services, the cable industry has voluntarily developed and deployed OCAP, which is now being voluntarily adopted by various consumer-electronics manufacturers (even without CEA endorsement). A (mostly) free-market solution may be emerging despite the FCC’s failure to impose one; and while OCAP has its detractors, it seems unlikely that an FCC-mandated solution would be any better, or any more attainable.

If I had to bet (and in a sense, I already have), I’d bet that the tuning resolver will make SDV a non-issue before too long. And furthermore, I think OCAP is coming, whether the FCC blesses it or not. So in buying a TiVo HD and a lifetime subscription for it, I’m accepting some risks: I’m risking that the SDV solution might not come as soon as I’d like, and I’m risking that an OCAP-based TiVo Series 4 might come along in a year or so and render my new TiVo obsolete.

I decided to take my chances. But if TiVo offers me a deal on an OCAP-compliant Series 4 in a year or two, I’ll probably be getting in line.

When I first contemplated the switch to cable and a TiVo HD, I ended up indulging my usual obsessive tendency and researched the technological and regulatory issues rather excessively; I wanted to make sure I understood the technology and any potential complications.

Having filled my brain with all of this information, I felt I had to do something with it. So I decided to write a blog post, which got out of hand and grew into a nine-page, 5000-word article.

There’s not much I can do about that now, except break it into parts to make it a bit more manageable. I have no idea whether anyone will read this, but I had fun writing it.

Introduction

So are there any issues one should know about when considering a TiVo HD? What are the limitations of CableCARD technology, and where is the technology headed?
I’ll start with the conclusions I reached:

• It seems clear that the future of TiVo lies with cable. A satellite-compatible HD TiVo might someday exist, but not anytime soon; for now, TiVo seems to have made the decision to ally itself with the cable industry. So if you’re a TiVo lover like me, and you don’t want to stay stuck at Series 2, cable is inevitable.
• Having satellite as a competitor has done the cable industry some good. It’s not popular to say anything in favor of cable companies, but since making the switch from DirecTV to Time Warner Cable, I’ve had no complaints. They’re quite competitive, and will become more so as more HD channels become available.
• However, there are indeed some issues that anyone considering a Series 3 or HD TiVo should be aware of. I decided that these issues were not enough to dissuade me; but it’s undeniable that we are in the middle of an unsettled, transitional period.

So what are these “issues” I keep talking about? They’re complicated and, remarkably, have been brewing for more than a decade.

The Integration Ban

Twelve years ago, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a major revision of telecommunications law intended to promote competition and openness. One of the provisions of this act, Section 629, addressed the issue of “navigation devices” – the hardware you use to tune cable channels – and gave the FCC a directive:

The Commission shall, in consultation with appropriate industry standard-setting organizations, adopt regulations to assure the commercial availability … of converter boxes, interactive communications equipment, an other equipment used by consumers to access multichannel video programming and other services … from manufacturers, retailers, and other vendors not affiliated with any multichannel video programming distributor.

In other words, Congress wanted it to be possible for customers to receive cable TV programming without having to lease a set-top box from the cable company. Essentially, they wanted to ensure the availability of “cable-ready” consumer electronics: not only TVs, but other devices like DVRs (even though this was several years before TiVo hit the market). Furthermore, they wanted such devices to be “portable”: a device bought for use with one cable company should also be usable with any other cable company in the country.

With many cable systems moving toward digital transmission, the problem of creating consumer electronics that were “digital cable ready” (DCR) wasn’t just one of figuring out how to decode the signal. The real issue was security: the technology the cable companies would use to control access to their content.

In the analog days, there really wasn’t much security. Analog cable signals were scrambled, and only paying subscribers were supposed to have the equipment to descramble the channels they paid for. But unauthorized descramblers were readily available from third-party sellers, and there wasn’t really any way for the cable companies to control that (other than reminding everyone that stealing cable service was, in fact, stealing).

The transition to digital cable provided an opportunity for cable companies to remedy this problem. By encrypting their digital signals, and providing decryption only through leased set-top boxes (STBs), the cable companies could lock down access to their networks. That meant that the STB actually had two distinct functions: it was a navigation device (used to tune channels) and a security device (used to decrypt the signals).

No one questioned the cable companies’ need to retain control over security. So in order to make third-party navigation devices possible, a way had to be found to decouple security from navigation. In 1998, the FCC issued an order requiring cable companies to “separate out security functions from non-security functions,” with a deadline of July 1, 2000; this meant making available a separable security module that could be used with a third-party navigation device. And after January 1, 2005, the cable companies would be required to use the separate security module in their own STBs, instead of STBs with integrated security functions.

The idea was to level the playing field: the cable-company STBs would now theoretically have no competitive advantage over third-party devices, and the cable companies would be motivated to support the separate security module because they would be relying on it themselves. This principle came to be known as “common reliance,” but is more often referred to simply as the “integration ban.”

CableCARD

Two parties were primarily responsible for implementing the FCC’s order: the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), representing the cable industry, and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), representing manufacturers of third-party devices like televisions, VCRs, and DVRs. It was the task of these two groups to devise a technical implementation for the separable security module.

After difficult negotiations, the two parties eventually produced a specification known as CableCARD 1.0. This specification defined the hardware for the security module: the so-called CableCARD itself, a small device based on the form factor of a PCMCIA adapter (or PC Card). The specification also defined the operation of a CableCARD host device – the TV, DVR, or other navigation device into which the CableCARD would be plugged.

The first third-party CableCARD host devices became available in 2004. After several delays, the integration ban went into effect on July 1, 2007. Since that date, all cable navigation devices – including the cable companies’ own STBs – have been required to use CableCARDs. (There are exceptions; the FCC has granted extensions to some cable companies that have asked for more time to make the transition.)

With cable companies now offering CableCARDs as an alternative to the usual STBs, third-party manufacturers could now make devices with CableCARD slots. Among other things, this made possible the TiVo Series 3 and the TiVo HD, which use CableCARDs to decrypt and record the digital data stream without having to re-encode it (which would be impractical for a high-definition signal).

Finally, it seemed that digital cable customers could get rid of their set-top boxes. But unfortunately, the CableCARD 1.0 specification had a serious flaw.

A two-way street

Traditional cable television involves a strictly unidirectional flow of information. The cable company sends over its network a multiplexed signal containing all of the channels it offers; the STB unscrambles or decrypts the channels you are authorized to watch, and tunes in the one you want to see at any given time, but is otherwise a passive receiver.

But cable companies have for a long time been exploring ideas for interactive services. A familiar example is pay-per-view movies; others include interactive electronic program guides (EPGs) and video on demand (VOD). What these services have in common is the need for bidirectional data flow: to order a VOD program, for example, your equipment must be able to send a request upstream to the cable network.

Unfortunately, the NCTA and the CEA had been unable to agree on standards for bidirectional services. Instead, they came back to the FCC with a proposal that covered only unidirectional operation, and this is what was approved as CableCARD 1.0. The CableCARD security device itself is capable of bidirectional operation; but the specification for host devices like TVs or DVRs does not define how interactive services are accessed. Indeed, the specification defines host devices as “unidirectional cable products” or UDCPs, and does not permit bidirectional operation.

The absence of any standards meant that as the cable industry continued to develop new interactive services, they did so using systems that were proprietary and mutually incompatible. These incompatibilities made it impossible for third-party devices to access these services, even if the CableCARD license terms had allowed it.

This limitation of the CableCARD 1.0 specification may have seemed acceptable at the time; interactive cable services were still relatively new, and the CEA apparently believed that their customers would not consider them essential. One can certainly argue that VOD, for example, is less important to a DVR user, for whom everything is viewed “on demand.”

But one bidirectional service proved to be far more problematic.

Switched digital video

As more and more HD channels become available, providers are in a race to see who can deliver more of them. But HD takes a lot of bandwidth.

Satellite providers like DirecTV can address this problem by launching more satellites, but cable companies cannot upgrade their infrastructure so easily. If they are to remain competitive, they have to find ways to use their existing bandwidth more efficiently. One such method is switched digital video, or SDV.

Unlike conventional channels that are transmitted all the time – so-called linear channels – an SDV channel is transmitted by the cable headend (a sort of distribution hub) only when a customer actually tunes it in. This works because at any given time, most of the customers served by the headend tend to watch a small number of popular channels like the local network affiliates, while many specialty channels might have no viewers at all. Rather than wasting bandwidth on channels that no one is watching, SDV allows the cable company to dynamically allocate frequencies to those channels when they’re needed, and reassign those frequencies to something else when they’re not.

For the viewer, an SDV channel is indistinguishable from a linear channel: it still has its own channel number, and you tune it the same way. But under the covers, there’s a lot going on: the navigation device must request the channel from the headend, which replies with a dynamically allocated frequency. Additional protocols exist for notifying the headend when the channel is no longer being watched (or recorded), freeing the frequency up for other uses. All of this means that SDV, while not an interactive service, is bidirectional – and is therefore incompatible with UDCPs. SDV channels are simply not available to anyone using such a device.

Consequently, cable companies across the country have been sending out notices to their CableCARD UDCP subscribers, warning them that they will not be able to get certain channels unless they lease a cable-company STB. Even in areas where SDV has not yet been deployed (like here in Raleigh/Durham), it looms on the horizon and could go into operation at any time.

It has not escaped the notice of the FCC, or Congress, that SDV threatens to undermine the whole point of CableCARDs. But in November of 2007, TiVo and the NCTA jointly announced that they were working together on a solution: an external USB adapter called a “tuning resolver,” which will enable the necessary two-way communication and make it possible for existing CableCARD TiVos to access SDV channels. The announcement promised that this device will be available in the second quarter of 2008.

Such deadlines have a habit of slipping, but given the FCC’s interest, both TiVo and the NCTA have some pretty strong motivation to make it happen. And the tuning resolver represents only part of the much bigger, and nastier, debate: how to resolve the problem of bidirectional services.

To be continued…

I know that my readers are on the edges of their seats, so I don’t want to leave everybody in suspense. Here’s the end of the story. Or at least the end of the story so far.

Friday’s installation appointment went about as smoothly as I could have hoped. The installer, Joe, arrived at about 11:00, right in the middle of the promised appointment window, and as I’d hoped, he proved to know exactly what he was doing — far better than the sales rep I’d talked to on Wednesday. When I relayed to him what I’d been told about how only S-Cards were available, he pulled two M-Cards out of his pocket and showed them to me. The S-Cards, he told me, are pretty much impossible to get nowadays.

He had to work outside the house for only a few minutes; all he had to do was disconnect the coax cable from our satellite dish and hook it to a signal splitter connected to our incoming cable line. He then came inside to install the M-Card, configure the TiVo, and get everything activated properly. He’d clearly done TiVo installations before: I wasn’t needed at all and went back into the other room to get some work done.

I think most of the installation process consisted of communicating by phone with the Time Warner Cable office, getting them to send the necessary activation signals to the CableCARD and authorize the channels I’m supposed to receive. At one point I passed through the room and saw him watching a status screen that showed the number of “EMMs” that had been received. Curious about what those were, I went back to my computer and did a Google search, and ended up reading an informative CableCARD primer at Ars Technica. (EMMs are Entitlement Management Messages, essentially authorizations for specific services.)

The only hiccup came at the very end, and while initially alarming, it turned out to be inconsequential. Joe called me into the room and told me that everything was set up and properly configured, and the TiVo had correct program-guide data for all of the channels I was supposed to get. The only problem was that there was no video signal at all: when he tried to tune any channel, the TiVo showed a gray screen.

But the problem was clearly not a problem with the incoming signal, because we discovered that the TiVo was incapable of playing any video at all. Even the prerecorded videos that came on the TiVo’s hard drive would not play; in fact, even the animated TiVo background images were missing, and the menus were displayed against featureless gray. With a sinking feeling, I started to wonder if the TiVo — which was, after all, only two days old — was defective and had failed.

But then I thought about the CableCARD primer I had just read, and remembered reading that DVRs send all video through the CableCARD for decryption — even recorded video, which is recorded in an encrypted form. If the TiVo was sending all its video through the newly installed CableCARD, it was conceivable that we were seeing some problem with that signal path.

Falling back on my instincts from my days in technical support, I suggested we reboot the TiVo. Rebooting is always a good first step when troubleshooting: often it fixes the problem, and even when it doesn’t, it buys you time. While the TiVo rebooted, I went to the computer and started Googling, looking for any other ideas.

But none were necessary. When the TiVo came back to life, everything was working, and a quick check verified that all of the channels came through like they were supposed to. Relieved, Joe had me sign on a couple of dotted lines, and then he left.

I have been prejudiced against cable for years, and that prejudice was reinforced back in 2000 when we had a brief and unsatisfactory flirtation with digital cable, shortly after it was introduced. But I have to say, so far I’m very pleased. The picture quality (even on the standard-definition channels) is every bit as good as DirecTV; we haven’t lost any channels (at least, none we care about), and we’ve actually gained some. And of course the HD channels are gorgeous. I wish there were more of them, but that’s a temporary situation: in a few years, they’ll probably all be HD.

The final chapter in this saga came yesterday evening, when I called DirecTV to disconnect our service. As I expected, the customer-service rep wanted to know what they had done wrong, and was presumably prepared to try to make it right. But of course it was too late, and despite my recent frustrations I’ve largely been very satisfied with them for a long time. So I just told her we had line-of-sight issues with the HD satellites, one problem that is clearly out of their hands; she confirmed all of the necessary information, and said our service would be turned off at the end of the billing cycle.

So my quest comes to an end, though not the end I originally expected. I have gone on at great length about all of this, but I’m going to stop now. I have TV to watch.

I’ve been spending my evening setting up a brand-new TiVo, the third I’ve owned since 2000. Rather remarkable, when one considers that yesterday morning I was expecting to retire my TiVo.

Having slept on it and woken up convinced that this was still the right way to go, I decided not to waste any time today. I made two stops on the way home from work.

The first was a waste of time, and I knew it probably would be: I stopped at the Time Warner Cable kiosk at Southpoint Mall, to see what they might tell me about CableCARD service. (Without going into unnecessary detail, CableCARD is a specification for a smart card that takes the place of a cable box, and is designed to be plugged into receiving equipment like TVs and DVRs. The HD TiVos require CableCARDs to receive cable programming.) As I expected, the twenty-something guy at the kiosk knew far less than I did, and told me several things that I knew to be wrong. I thanked him and left.

Undeterred, I decided to proceed to my second stop: the Best Buy store across the street. It took me only a few minutes to find the HD TiVos, carry one to the checkout, pay for it, and leave. I headed home feeling rather strange, having just bought a TiVo I can’t use, because I don’t even have cable yet. But since I’d decided on my course of action, I saw no reason to wait, and I thought it would be better to have the TiVo on hand.

After I got home I called Time Warner Cable, steeling myself for a conversation with a sales rep who might not understand what I needed. After a short wait, a guy named Jeremy answered; I explained to him that I am a current Road Runner subscriber, that I had just bought an HD TiVo, and that I was looking to add CableCARD digital-cable service. To my great relief, he knew exactly what I was talking about and said he could set that right up.

The only confusion came when I told him that, to support dual-tuner functionality, I need either one multistream CableCARD (M-Card) or two single-stream cards (S-Cards).  (The M-Card, as the name suggests, is capable of tuning multiple channels at the same time; the HD TiVo supports either a single M-Card or dual S-Cards.) He seemed to know what I was talking about, but insisted that Time Warner Cable “no longer offers” M-Cards, and that I’d have to have two S-Cards. And that I’d therefore have to pay two installation fees, $42.95 per card. Jeremy apologized for this but said there was nothing that could be done about it.

Now, I know this to be false: I’ve seen multiple online reports from people in this area who have had recent M-Card installations. And the M-Cards are newer, so there’s no reason why TWC would have had them previously, but not anymore.

I might not have made an issue of it if it weren’t for installation fee, which is ridiculous enough for a single card. After I made it clear that I was unhappy, Jeremy consulted two different supervisors and eventually came back with a slightly better answer: although he insisted that M-Cards really were not available, he offered to credit our account for the cost of the second installation. (I didn’t point out that five minutes earlier, he’d claimed that any such accommodation was impossible.)

I’m still not entirely satisfied; although I’m escaping the doubled installation fee, I’m sure we will still have to pay monthly rental for two CableCARDs (fortunately, that’s only a couple of bucks). But I’m willing to fight that battle another time; and if I’m very lucky, the installer might know what he’s doing and show up with an M-Card despite what I heard today.

It’s fortunate that I went ahead and bought the TiVo, because I was able to set up the cable installation for Friday (the day after tomorrow). The TiVo instructions recommend completing the Guided Setup a couple of days in advance, giving the TiVo time to download program-guide data and software updates before the cable installer shows up. So that’s what I’ve been doing this evening.

The new box has no input signal, so I can’t do anything but look at the menus and watch a gray screen; and yet it is oddly comforting to see that familiar interface. TiVo has never let me down before, and this new TiVo seems so confident that it will be able to provide me with the HD programming I want. How could it be wrong?

Remember all that stuff I said about giving up TiVo?

Never mind.

Let me bring the story up to date. Last week I described the second visit by DirecTV installers, where they confirmed the tree problem, suggested an alternate site for the dish, and recommended a second opinion. I was told someone would contact me to set this up; in fact, what happened was someone left a message on the answering machine (even though I’d given them my cell-phone number), so I had to call them. I set up the appointment for the second opinion for today, between 8 AM and noon.

No one showed up. After calling the installation company multiple times, waiting on hold, and talking to a customer-service rep who was apparently even more confused than I was, finally I was promised that a technician would indeed be sent out this afternoon. He finally showed up at about 6:00 this evening, by which time I’d become rather frustrated and pessimistic about anything actually happening today.

My mood did not improve when he gave me the much-anticipated second opinion: he felt that there was no suitable location for the dish. Not even the location in the front, which the previous technician had suggested. No matter where we put the dish, trees would be in the way. I managed to thank him for his trouble, and he left.

And so it seems I have no good options for DirecTV. To put the dish in the back, which is what I would have preferred, I’d have to cut down quite a few trees, some of them very large; I’m not prepared to do this myself, nor to pay to have it done professionally. Fewer trees would have to go if we put the dish in the front, but that was never my preferred location anyway. And frankly, this whole experience has rather soured me on DirecTV; the trees aren’t their fault, but I’m rather annoyed by the poor communication and the ambiguous and contradictory information.

But I’m getting over my bitterness now. Two weeks ago I was agonizing about the prospect of giving up either DirecTV or TiVo; now that decision has been made easier. DirecTV may have more HD channels, but that’s irrelevant if I can’t get any of them. So it now seems that cable is my best option.

Despite my misgivings, I’m hopeful that this will all work out. I wish Time Warner Cable had more HD channels, but that will change over time; and of course it will be nice to be able to stay with TiVo. And if we find that we really hate cable, I suppose I can reconsider hiring someone to bulldoze half the back yard.

And then there’s always rabbit ears.