Two-way battle over; cable wins

fter a couple of years playing hard to get, Sony got into bed with the cable industry Tuesday and embraced CableLabs’ tru2way standard for interactive-cable-ready devices. That makes at least six major consumer electronics manufacturers who have signed onto the CableLabs standard for two-way plug-and-play (and, more important, the license agreement that so many CE executives deplored), the others being Panasonic, Samsung, LG, Toshiba and Thomson.

This subject is more than a little esoteric, but there’s a couple of real-world effects that are easy to identify. One is that Sony’s move strikes another blow against the cursed cable converter box and its monthly rental fees. The box’s functions should have been built into TV sets years ago, but cable operators and set makers were unable to agree on a standard approach to interactivity that would work on any system across the country. With Sony’s acquiescence, tru2way (formerly known as OCAP) is now effectively that standard. The second real-world impact is that Sony’s capitulation means there’s little chance we’ll see a cable-ready digital TV that fully integrates cable networks and services with complementary and competing programming from the Internet. The deals signed with CableLabs consign Internet content and other non-cable services to a program guide separate from the cable guide. The stricture rules out a guide that, for example, mixes on-demand movies from Netflix or Hulu with those from HBO.