All the comments to the FCC in response to the signal for ideas to replace the folded CableCARD idea were due that week so we spent a little date reading a few of them and found some overwhelming trends. Everyone seems to applaud the death of CableCARD and is pushing for an end to the associated mandates as well as those related to 1394. Neither of these two ideas worked out as planned as is evident by the fact that most consumers don’t use them. What’s more interesting though is the recommendations and none were as detailed and thought out as TiVo’s — although we confess we didn’t read them all. The view TiVo and others are getting behind is what might be known as a gateway, which we invision would look a lot like a cable modem. The key here is that while various gateways would be available depending on the medium your preferred provider used (coax, satellite, fiber), they’d all share a common interface on the consumer side and as you might expect that common interface would be of the IP variety with standard World Wide Web protocols like HTTP and SSL on top of it.