SleepyEgg

Here's something you don't see every day: companies like Microsoft and the cable industry relaxing content and DRM restrictions. But that's exactly what happened yesterday at the CEDIA EXPO trade show in Atlanta, where Microsoft announced that home users could now install CableCARD-powered digital TV tuners in their PCs, could use those tuners with switched digital video (SDV) cable systems, and could use recorded content more freely.

These might not sound like terrific changes, but they're significant relaxations of the existing CableCARD rules. CableLabs, the research and development consortium funded by the cable industry, developed and now licenses the CableCARD spec. In 2006, when CableCARD-ready tuners came to home computers, CableLabs decided it would be too much a risk to let such tuners be installed "in the wild" by customers. Instead, only specific computer configurations would be certified for use with such devices—CableLabs wanted to audit the systems to ensure a totally protected content path from tuner to computer to monitor.

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