Mark Fleischmann

CableLabs is working up a new version of the OpenCable Application Platform, according to Cable Digital News. OCAP is the R&D program that gave birth to the CableCARD. The new Version 1.1 would support IP-based video and multimedia streams. That would give the cable ops a leg up in their coming struggle against the telcos, especially AT&T, which is rolling out IP video delivery. OCAP 1.1 would also mesh with mobile applications to be launched this fall by Sprint, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, and Advance/Newhouse. It would support home networking, switched broadcast, advanced graphics, and other goodies. And it would allow cable companies to more easily insert commercials into VOD programming (yippee). The technology would likely take the form of a new set-top box. Whether it would migrate directly into television sets is up to the TV makers, but for the moment, they're not thrilled with the outcome of the existing CableCARD agreement.

One tuner to free them all.

Back when our ancestors lived in caves, when storytelling was the main form of entertainment around the evening fire, the biggest alpha male would designate the storyteller and club to death anyone who interrupted. This social arrangement has survived well into the age of the remote control.

Were you hoping that the CableCARD standard would enable you to ditch your cable box? Four years after cable operators and TV makers signed the historic CableCARD agreement, many consumers are still running into problems, according to FCC filings from the warring cable operators and TV makers. Each side blames the other for the snafus. And they're both worsening the problem: The initial standard is unidirectional, meaning no video-on-demand without the box, so some cable operators are obstructing CableCARD adoption by failing to support it at the head end. But the ever price-conscious TV makers aren't helping by eliminating CableCARD compatibility from their lines and walking away from the problem. For years the conventional wisdom has been that a VOD-capable bidirectional standard would someday heal all wounds. But the video-delivery landscape is changing and now CableLabs, the industry's R&D arm, is approaching digital cable readiness from some new angles. I'll report on them over the next few days.

Freedb, a key player in open-source CD databases, has succumbed to tensions among its founders. The site is still up but its future is uncertain. If you didn't already know, CD databases provide metadata lookup services to the likes of iTunes and the Windows Media Player, enabling them to display artist, song, album, genre, etc. Without them your iPod would not be nearly as versatile at organizing music. The grandpappy of them all was CDDB, founded in 1993 as a volunteer-driven project. When CDDB went commercial in 2000 as Gracenote, Freedb and other groups split off to maintain their own open-source databases on a nonprofit basis. The open-source services appear most often in PC-based software including rippers, taggers, and players other than iTunes and WMP. Freedb is also used by AudioReQuest, a consumer-level high-end server product. Freedb is survived by Musicbrainz, another open-source database. The biggest commercial databases are All Music Guide's LASSO (used by Windows Media Player and MusicMatch) and the category-leading Gracenote (used by iTunes).