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Rocky road is a tasty type of ice cream. It's also the forecast some analysts are making for Tru2Way, the latest attempt to provide the consumer with the holy grail of digital cable readiness.

Cable readiness has had a long and frustrating history. Back in the analog-only days, TV makers built "cable ready" tuners into TVs, only to see the cable industry respond with universal signal scrambling so it could keep collecting those set-top box rental fees.

Then, at the dawn of the DTV era, the major cable operators signed a pact with the major TV makers to provide digital cable readiness using a convenient CableCARD to provide the decryption for cable-ready TVs and a new generation of set-top boxes. But the cable ops deliberately sabotaged that standard, John Hancock or no John Hancock, with poor implementation because the original digital cable ready standard was unidirectional and therefore excluded the bidirectional communication necessary for lucrative video-on-demand services. So most CableCARDs ended up in set-top boxes, defeating the whole reason for having the card.

Most recently, the bidirectional CableCARD standard has arrived. It's called Tru2Way and has been adopted by a few major manufacturers. However, an ABI Research analyst says the outlook for Tru2Way is not much brighter than that for the previous CableCARD. He sees it being deployed in half of cable households by 2013, but mainly--again!--in boxes. And the cable industry isn't being very forthcoming about the whole subject:

"Consumer electronics manufacturers have been at odds with the cable industry over tru2way for a long time," says [analyst Steve] Wilson. "It's been a pretty contentious era. Vendors say the implementation is too expensive and that it's overkill for basic services. They point out that many cable operators aren't even deploying these systems. The cable operators themselves won't provide forecasts for tru2way STB deployments. They're not willing to tell the market (or developers) how many boxes they expect to ship over time."

Interoperability may be a problem, Wilson says: "There's no real interoperability testing, and no industry group focused on making sure that all the devices brought to market will work in all cable systems." Of course, the Federal Communications Commission could do what it did last time and broker an agreement for a unified standard to be implemented across the board by cable ops and DTV makers. But given what happened last time, that's a thin reed of hope. It would take years of negotiation, more years to have an effect, and there is no guarantee that the cable industry would not backslide into its bad old ways.

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