@moneymark

I didn't say these didn't make jobs, but they take a LOT less jobs to operate than the stores. It doesn't matter if the stores don't pay good, some people are jobless and would gladly take something like that over nothing.

I used to use firewire on my Comcast DVR, but now I use Windows Media Center.

I love these things but they are horrible for the economy. These types of things along with netflix are putting the video rental stores out of business, and with that taking away tons of jobs.

@(Unverified) Looks like upscaled 480i anyway.

Fox has Carrie Underwood's Christmas special

I would think the recession would have obviously increased the number of OTA viewers

10%? I highly doubt that, especially with the digital transition along with the recession. A lot of people can't afford their cable or satellite bills, and basic cable only provides analog SD (unless you have QAM, which then the only HD channels are your locals) To get HD non-local cable channels, you end up needing to pay over $100 a month on Comcast.

videos will only be re-encoded to 1080p if their source resolution is 1080p (or at least higher than 720p)

That's what the extension would do. CableCARD is essentially encrypted QAM, so the CableCARD extension + QAM tuner would decrypt the QAM signal and re-encrypt with some kind of DRM (probably done by media center I suppose)

I personally wouldn't buy a whole new tuner card to get CableCARD functionality, but I would definitely buy an extension that upgrades my current QAM tuner to have CableCARD support.

Here's an example of how that could work:
http://i38.tinypic.com/5015qh.jpg

So far yeah, but surely there would be a way to extend QAM tuners for CableCARD capabilities right? Such as a USB or front bay cablecard extension of some kind.