Coming Soon to a Windows 7 Machine Near You: Cable By Leslie Ellis, Multichannel Newswire, January 12, 2010
Last Wednesday night [January 6, 2010] on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corp., tucked a small remark into a gadget-y keynote. And if you work in multichannel video, you?re going to need to know about it. Soon.
He said this (paraphrased): By March, consumers will be able to purchase, at retail, a gizmo that turns a Windows 7-based PC into a mambo-box, capable of displaying or recording four scrambled HD channels on as many HDTV screens. In other words, it shares a CableCard across four channels. This applies to new PCs with Windows7, as well as existing PCs, upgrading to Win7.
The device is made by Seattle area-based Ceton Corp. It looks like any other expansion card meant to be stuffed into desktop and tower-style PCs: About the size of two Pop Tarts, glued together. (Laptop users: yes, a USB peripheral version is in the works, as is a 6-tuner version.)