It’s coming. This week Charlotte Time Warner Cable customers got a letter informing them up the upcoming implementation of Switched Digital Video (SDV) technology. It’s only a matter of time before Raleigh’s TWC customers get hit with this “upgrade”.

Andres at My Network Project explains it well. The good news is that SDV allows TWC to offer more HD channels. The (very) bad news is that SDV pretty much kills the idea of using a Cable Card. Cable companies, faced with a finite amount of bandwidth, have come up with a way to offer channels. With SDV they will make groups of lightly used channels “on-demand”, basically. In other words the signal for these channels will not come down the pipe unless the viewer tunes one of them. In order to send the call for any of the channels, one must have a 2-way communication to the cable company. A Time Warner set-top box or DVR will make this call, as they are able to send requests for on-demand shows.

Cable Card, however, is a technology that only allows 1-way communication. Not only is this frustrating because of the people who are currently using Cable Cards in their TVs and Vista Media Centers (vid1, vid2), but also because Cable Card was the result of a mandate by the government. The intent was for customers to be able to watch all available streaming channels without being required to rent hardware from the cable company. It’s no accident that the introduction of SDV forces customers into renting equipment. (How is this legal?) Perhaps the next version of Cable Card, True2Way, will ease problems, but that doesn’t help people who have already faithfully invested hundreds of dollars in Cable Card technologies.

The good news here is that the channels really are tertiary channels for the majority of viewers. The channels that Charlotte’s TWC will be putting on SDV are below the fold.

09/04/08 Update

Ian Dixon has found a discussion on the The Green Button about SDV. Some feel that a software upgrade is all that is needed to get CableCard devices to work with SDV while others feel a hardware solution is needed.

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