OpenCable™
The OpenCable™ initiative, managed by CableLabs, began in 1997 with the goal of helping the cable industry deploy interactive services. Like several other CableLabs projects, including OpenCable and PacketCable™, OpenCable provides a set of industry specifications. OpenCable specifications help achieve the goal of interactive service delivery by meeting three key objectives:
  1. Defining the next-generation digital consumer device.
  2. Encouraging supplier competition.
  3. Creating a retail hardware and software platform.
As such, the OpenCable project has hardware specifications and software specifications. The hardware specifications describe one-way and two-way digital cable-ready “host” devices that are interoperable with cable systems throughout the U.S., thus creating a retail solution for consumer electronics products for cable. The software specifications of the OpenCable project, called the OpenCable Platform, solve the problem of proprietary operating system software, thereby creating a common platform for interactive television applications and services. Interactive (bi-directional) OpenCable products require a middleware stack; an element that enables delivery of digital video to personal computers, called the OpenCable Unidirectional Receiver (OCUR), does not.
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