I’ve alway been fascinated by interesting technology.

Today, I’m gonna talk about CableCARD. What is it?

The FCC foresaw a future where customers wouldn’t need to rent setup boxes for cable and that TV manufactures would step in to provide a solution, so it was enshrined in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that cable companies need to support third party access to premium channels. The solution was the CableCARD.

The card looks like a PCMIA card and once paired with the cable company, would allow any device to decrypt any digital channel offered by the cable companies.

Myself, I had both a TV, a 2006 Samsung Rear Projection DLP HDTV(I’ll cover the different HDTV technologies another time) and a TiVo HD(Oh, another technology to cover in the future).

My Internet provider actually provided 2 CableCARDs to me for free.

So what happened? Besides the obvious of cable companies not promoting it, TV manufacturers stopped including the slot in the products.

I had a TiVo with a cable card until 2017, when I dropped cable and cut the cord.

By then, my TiVo had the ability to record 6 channels at once all with one CableCARD.

But with the advent of streaming, CableCARD’s days were numbered anyway.

But I salute the 11 years of service I got from them.

You can read more about CableCARD here or at you local library.