A recollection of a now-faded technology that was supposed to do away with a staple of cable television: the set-top box. Of course, it didn’t. A Memory Lane column from CED Magazine.

All boxed up
By Stewart Schley

Ever since the cable industry began to deploy set-top boxes, people have been trying to figure out ways to eliminate them.

The latest and most notorious example, of course, is the CableCard, the much-maligned approach to creating interoperability between digital cable services and TV devices. With less than 1 percent of U.S. households having purchased one of the things to slip into TiVo boxes or TV sets, the CableCard has been embraced by U.S. consumers with about the same level of fervor as that associated with New Coke, the disastrous 1985 soft drink reformulation.

Thus, the set-top box remains both a staple of the common cable user experience and a source of frustration to those who would like to break in to the market. Apple Inc. chairman Steve Jobs recently complained that the near-ubiquitous set-top box is what stands in the way of innovation. “The TV industry has a subsidized model that gives everyone a set-top box for free. So no one wants to buy a box. Ask TiVo, ask Roku, ask us, ask Google in a few months,” said Jobs at Dow Jones’s D8 conference in June. “The only way that’s going to change is if you tear up the set-top box, give it a new UI, and get it in front of consumers in a way that they’re going to want it.” (more…)