Once upon a time if a business wanted phones to make calls they had to buy a proprietary system and handsets. Whether it was a PBX, hybrid or key system from Lucent, Mitel, Ericsson, Nortel or others - it was proprietary. And expensive. Then came VoIP.
Anyone who was around at that time can recall the key word that was always attached to anything IP - "ubiquitous". As pretentious as the word and description was it did come true. IP has become "ubiquitous". Well for everything except cable set top boxes.
MSO's and smaller cable companies have invested billions in MPEG2 set top boxes. They don't want to go to the expense of switching out those boxes just so the customers can enjoy MPEG4 HD programming and other IP based services. And the customers don't seem to want to foot that bill either. Surprisingly the answer to this conundrum may turn out to be relatively simple.
If a game console or box like Apple TV or Roku can accept the encryption client from the MSO to insure content protection as well as accepting the EPG and data - then the switch-over from proprietary MPEG2 based STB to IP based consumer product could be for the most part painlessly achieved.
I think Apple understands this which is why the next version of Apple TV will probably more closely resemble a traditional STB (but with cloud based DVR functionality). This is not much different than Cisco back in the day getting into the VoIP handset market. It should be noted that the VoIP handset didn't replace the traditional TDM-based phone overnight but the VoIP handset market was much more profitable.
How many people do you know selling PBX's today? In ten years the same thing will be said about people selling QAM based systems and set top boxes.
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