Lackluster CableCARD adoption: who's to blame?

For all of its promise, CableCARD has seen excruciatingly slow adoption on the part of cable customers. According to the National Cable and Telecommunications Association quarterly report to the Federal Communications Commission, as of March 15, only 259,000 CableCARDs have been deployed in the homes of cable customers. That's up 59,000 from last fall's 200,000 figure.

At first glance, the numbers look good. After all, it's a 29.5 percent increase. But there were 65.6 million US households with cable TV as of the end of 2006, which means that only about 0.3 percent of US cable subscribers are getting in on the CableCARD goodness at this point, despite the fact that devices supporting the technology have been around since at least 2004.

CableCARD is supposed to get a boost this summer when the FCC's "integration ban" goes into effect at the beginning of July. That ban will force cable operators to stop offering set-top boxes with an integrated security component, meaning that consumers will be able to buy their own boxes with additional features instead of being forced to rely on their cable company's offering.