Yesterday, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) provided the Federal Communications Commission with an update on the number of deployed CableCards by cable operators.
Of the five cable operators that were required to report their CableCard numbers yesterday – Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable – the NCTA said that almost 390,000 CableCards have been installed in set-top boxes, or to a lesser degree, TVs and DVRs. The five cable operators serve roughly 80 percent of cable subscribers across the nation.
When the CableCards deployed by the next five largest incumbent cable operators are added into the mix, the NCTA reported that there have been just over 420,000 CableCards deployed for use in retail devices by the 10 largest incumbent cable operators that serve approximately 90 percent of the cable subscribers in the country.
By contrast, since the integration ban went into effect on July 1, 2007, those 10 companies have already deployed more than 12.35 million operator-supplied set-top boxes with CableCards. In less than 21 months, cable operators have deployed almost 30 times as many CableCard-enabled devices than the total number of CableCards requested by customers for use in retail devices in the last five years.
