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A CableCARD is a special-use PC Card device.


In technical contexts, "CableCARD" refers more broadly to a set of technologies created by the United States cable television industry in response to requirements by federal government's Telecommunications Act of 1996 that cable companies allow non cable company provided devices to access their networks.

Use of the term CableCARD can be confusing, because some technologies refer not to the physical card, but to a device ("Host") that uses the card. Some CableCARD technologies can be used with devices that have no physical CableCARDs.

AllVid is a proposed successor system announced in 2010 by the FCC.[1][2] Unlike CableCARD, AllVid is intended to enable two-way services such as interactive program guides, pay- per-view, and video-on-demand.


The portion of the 1996 Telecom law which resulted in the creation of CableCARDs is known as Section 629, instructing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to:



The FCC was charged with working with industry to carry out the directives of the 1996 law. On June 11, 1998, after securing proposals and recommendations from interested parties, the FCC ordered that cable companies would provide a separable security access device by July 1, 2000 which could be used by third-party devices to access digital cable networks.[4] One important issue was the concern that cable companies might not be motivated to provide efficient security access mechanisms for competitor companies to use. To address this, the FCC directed that the cable companies would by January 1, 2005 also have to use a separable access device that was also available to third parties. The cable company would be banned from providing devices that relied on a security access mechanism integrated with the device after the 2005 deadline. This rule is usually referred to as the "integration ban", and has been unsuccessfully challenged in the courts and in FCC petitions by the cable companies. The deadline was shifted forward twice and went into effect July 1, 2007.[5]



Existing standard and certification procedures[edit]


The first test tool to verify compliance of OpenCable hosts with the CableCARD one-way single stream specifications, HPNX, was released by SCM and Digital Keystone in 2003.[6] Subsequently the HPNX Pro version, supporting two-way and M-card specifications, was released by Digital Keystone in 2006.[7] The "M-UDCP Device Acceptance Test Plan" published by CableLabs defines how to use the HPNX Pro test tool to validate the OpenCable host devices.[8]



The current CableCARD standard was born out of an adversarial process between two main groups: cable companies represented by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and consumer electronics companies represented by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The portion of the CableCARD specs that could be agreed on describe how one-way services work, and so only the portion known as UDCP (Unidirectional Digital Cable Product) was required by the FCC. As it was the only thing required, most of the early devices were only one-way capable; however all the actual CableCARDs produced were always two-way capable. Many enhancements to the CableCARD standard including the optional Multi-Stream support became known as CableCARD 2.0.

Optical cable services (e.g. Verizon FiOS) are classified as cable services and must, by FCC rules, also support the CableCARD standard. No cable providers in Canada currently support CableCARD. Video providers in Europe must conform to the DVB standard which is a more comprehensive open standard governed by independent standards bodies.


Physical CableCARDs[edit]

A Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco) multi-stream CableCard or "M-card"
Same CableCard, view of the back-side

The physical CableCARD that is inserted into the host device is a PC Card type II that handles decryption of video and ensures that only people that have paid for a channel may view it. This is also known as a "conditional-access module" function.

There are two kinds of physical CableCARDs:


No actual M-Cards were released before CableCARD 2.0 was released which combined and enhanced the CableCARD 1.0 and Multi-Stream standards.[10] M-Cards are backward compatible with current CableCARD devices. To older CableCARD devices that do not support multiple streams, the card appears to be a single stream card. CE companies have long wanted M-Cards for their CableCARD 1.0 host devices in order to compete with Cable company devices that use multiple tuners. This is important for products such as Moxi & TiVo CableCARD DVRs, televisions with picture-in-picture and CableCARD-equipped personal computers, which need to be able to record one show while the user is watching another. To enable this without an M-Card, these products would be required to use multiple S-CARDs.

A common misconception is that there is a CableCARD 2.0 physical card that will provide two way services which is not compatible with a UDCP (one-way) certified devices. This is not the case. OpenCable Host Devices (two-way) are able to use either S-CARDs or M-Cards. And older UDCP certified devices can also use either card (but unless they are M-UDCP won't be able to take advantage of multiple streams).



As of May 2012, six manufacturers have multi-stream CableCARDs (M-CARDS) qualified by CableLabs: Arris Group (using the Motorola brand after their acquisition of Motorola Mobility's cable/set-top box division), Cisco (formerly Scientific Atlanta), NDS Group, Conax USA, Inc., Evolution Broadband.,[11] and Nagravision (Kudelski Group).


There has been much resistance from the cable companies to CableCARD rollout across the United States with the cable companies preferring to support their own set-top boxes. This has changed somewhat with the July 2007 FCC integration ban, which required all new set-top boxes to use CableCARDs as their decryption mechanism. Prior to this, adoption had proceeded slowly with 141,000 units by February 2006. By June 2009, there were over 14,000,000 CableCARDs deployed including 437,800 of which went into retail equipment.[12] Currently almost all the retail equipment is not capable of two way communications.



Technical overview[edit]

CableCARD is a term trademarked by CableLabs for the Point of Deployment (POD) module defined by standards including SCTE 28, SCTE 41, CEA-679 and others. The CableCARD is physically a PC Card type II, supplied by the cable company, which is inserted into a slot in the host (typically a digital television set or a set-top box) in order to identify and authorize the customer, and to provide proprietary decoding of the encrypted digital cable signal without the need for a set-top box. The cable tuner and QAM demodulator themselves are part of the host device, as is the MPEG decoder. The role of the card is to perform any conditional access and decryption functions. This results in an MPEG-2 transport stream, which is decoded by the host. The card also receives messages sent over the out-of-band signaling channel by the cable company's Head end servers and forwards them to the host.

As of November 1, 2011, all US cable operators must allow self-installation of CableCARDs.[13]

CableCARDs with personal computers:

Existing integrated cable set-top boxes perform four basic functions:

  1. Enable receiving and selecting digital and analog cable channels
  2. Uniquely identify the customer and authorize the features to which they have subscribed
  3. Decode scrambled digital channels and premium programming such as movie channels
  4. Provide interactive two-way communications for:
    1. Interactive programming guides
    2. Pay-per-view
    3. Video on Demand
    4. Switched video streams


  • built-in support for receiving digital cable channels (via an internal QAM tuner)
  • a slot for the current version of CableCARD, which allows decryption of encrypted digital channels.


Because the conditional access system is in software, it can be sent with the video as a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM). The CableCARD Host Licensing Agreement (CHILA) and the DCAS agreement restrict the technologies that CE companies may use for distributing video from host devices. CE companies object to this expanding the notion of CableCARD network security issues to also include content protection issues. They prefer to deal with content owners directly with their standards and regard cable company protocols and formats as a transport only. CE companies wish to communicate video inside the home network using their own protected protocols and formats.




Main article: AllVid

In 2010, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a notice of inquiry for a successor system, called AllVid.[1][2]

See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b AllVid Notice of Inquiry, 25 FCC Rcd 4275 (adopted April 21, 2010)
  2. ^ a b Wolf, Michael (11 February 2014). "Why Big Cable Fears AllVid — and Why It Shouldn't". GigaOM. 
  7. ^ "CableLabs Awards Qualification to Scientific Atlanta for Multi-Stream CableCARD". 2006-04-06. Retrieved 2009-11-04. 
  8. ^ "M-UDCP Device Acceptance Test Plan TP-ATP-M-UDCP-I02-20070105". 2007-01-05. Retrieved 2009-11-10. [dead link]
  11. ^ Baumgartner, Jeff (28 August 2009). "CableLabs Blesses Evolution's CableCARD". Cable Digital News. 
  12. ^

External links[edit]