Entertainment 2.0

Up until CES, ATI was just about the only company offering Cable-Card tuners for your Media Center experience.  As of today, that could change very soon.

Centon has announced a multi-stream PCI cable card adapter that, apparently, will be able to record 6 channels at once.  Much like they say in the EngadgetHD article where I found this, I wonder if that’s even possible for one PCI card to handle 6 streams…especially HD.

Like every other solution out there however, you’ll have to have an overpriced OEM cable-card ready system in order to use this thing.  Too bad really.  Unlock the things and I’ll upgrade my cable instead of cancelling it there, Time Warner!

While this isn’t something that I’ll ever look to buy, it looks as though Ace Computers will be showing $999 cable-card ready PCs at CES this year.  For those who don’t know, Cable-card tuners are required to be able to view encrypted cable channels in your Media Center, and these tuners are only available with OEM systems.  You can’t build your own system and include them.

This automatically means that I want nothing to do with these systems, however, the ability to get cable-card into people’s homes at this price might be a good thing.  These types of systems would make it a lot easier to gain market share for Media Center.  Most people aren’t going to drop $5000+ on a Lifeware or Niveus system to get get cable card.  They might just go for this though.

Hopefully we’ll get more info from Ace during the show!

From Electronic House.