TV manufacturers and U.S. cable operators have agreed to eliminate set-top boxes for digital service, allowing cable to be directly plugged into digital sets, a pact that has ignited fears over the prospect of increased digital piracy on both sides of the border.

But Michael Lee, VP of product development for Toronto-based Rogers Cable, says that although decoding technology will be built into new digital sets, the responsibility for ensuring conditional access remains with the cable companies.

‘Our conditional access systems…have never been compromised, unlike satellite, which is leaky. There’s no reason to believe that when we move into this new model with the same conditional access that we would be leaky,’ says Lee. ‘At the end of the day, the same core technology that’s protecting our assets now will protect our assets tomorrow.’

The disappearance of set-top boxes for digital mirrors the evolution of standard analogue TVs, and according to Michele Beck, VP engineering at the CCTA, this ‘is certainly the way the cable industry visualized the evolution of the digital interfaces.’

Beck explains that removing the set-top boxes essentially removes a link in the chain a signal must go through, which she says would ‘make the signal much more secure, it would make it much more difficult to copy or duplicate and then redistribute.’