Ceton Fesses Up: Quad CableCard Tuner to Ship May 31

It's been a strange ride for the Ceton multi-channel digitial cable tuner from Ceton Corp.

The product allows a single multistream M-Card from the Motorola to fit within a small chassis, eliminating the need for space-consuming CableCards and slots required for today's PCTVs.

Long before the Ceton product officially debuted at CES 2009, fans of Windows Media Center and other PCTVs waited impatiently for M-Card progress. During CES 2009, the company maintained the multistream tuner would ship in Q1 2010 and at least one third-party supplier, Cannon PC, as well as Ceton itself has maintained a March 31 ship date until a couple of days ago. Cannon removed the product from its Web site, shortly after posting it.

In a letter to customers, Ceton Corp. said its tuners will ship on May 31. Manufacturers miss their ship dates all the time, but Ceton apparently knew about the delay well before mid-March, when it finally fessed up.

The company knew it would not meet the March 31 deadline but held off informing the public it "wanted to make sure that when we gave you a new date we had a high degree of confidence in it. We have that confidence today."

Zones is the only company pre-selling the Ceton tuners for now.

From the letter: "The InfiniTV 4 Pre-Order Program will only be available on Zones.com. The program won’t be available forever and initial quantities will be limited, so make sure you get your order in today!"

No word on when Cannon and other resellers will get their hands on the tuners.

The other notable item from the letter is that Ceton has found a way to keep the tuner cool without the need for fans.



From Ceton:

As you know, we’ve been hard at work for many months developing our quad-tuner digital cable product and today we want to give you an update on where things stand. To be frank, it’s a good news/bad news situation, but we’d rather be up front with our customers and fans as opposed to trying to sugarcoat things.

First, let’s get the bad news out of the way so we can focus on the good stuff. The Ceton quad-tuner card will unfortunately not ship on March 31 as we had planned. The new ship date is May 31, 2010. We know this isn’t welcome news, and trust us that no one is more disappointed in the delay than we are, but our #1 objective is to ship a great product and if that means taking some extra time to do that then we believe that’s the right decision for everyone.

Why the delay? There isn’t any single reason, or any major “show stoppers”, for why it’s taking us a bit longer than planned. It just boils down to a handful of small issues that are typical in new product development and that collectively add up. We’ve developed a first-of-its-kind product and that means we’re forging new ground in several areas, which always makes things a bit harder to plan for.

How confident are you in the May 31 date? We’re highly confident we’ll be able to ship units to end users on May 31. R&D is finished, testing has been going very well, and we’re about to kick off our first production run of final, finished product units.

How come you’re telling us now instead of earlier? We’ve known for a little while now that we’d miss the March 31 date but wanted to make sure that when we gave you a new date we had a high degree of confidence in it. We have that confidence today.

So what’s the good news? Well, glad you asked! We have a couple of exciting things we want to share with you today.

The New Name! As you know in December we launched a “Name the Product” contest on The Green Button to harness the collective energy and brainpower of the Media Center Community in helping us come up with a name for our line of digital cable TV tuners. We thought the contest would be popular but were frankly blown away by the results. Hundreds of people submitted more than 1,000 names! In fact the response was so great we decided that instead of just one winner we’d have three!

So without further ado … InfiniTV is the new family name for our line of digital cable tuner products. InfiniTV 4 is the name of the 4-tuner PCIe card coming out May 31. We won’t go into all the reasons we chose InfiniTV over the other options, but in the end we felt it best reflected the aspirations we have for the product line, it spoke to opening up new capabilities for TV on the PC, and it meshed very well with our “Live without Limits" philosophy.

Who are the naming contest winners? Congratulations to Gary Petro who submitted InfiniTV! You will be receiving a free Ceton InfiniTV 4 hot off the first production run!

The second category we decided to award was for most submissions. In addition to the sheer number of people who submitted a name, a handful of people submitted 10 names or more, including one person who submitted 23, one who submitted 32, and one who submitted 47 names. But one particularly avid fan submitted a whopping 94 names! And these were good names that he’d obviously put some thought to. A couple of his ideas even made it into our list of finalists. So, the winner of the award for the most submissions is Russ Sanchez! Congratulations Russ, you too will receive a brand new Ceton InfiniTV 4 in May!

Reading through the list of ideas, we found ourselves chuckling at a number of the names. Some were incredibly creative, some were just downright bizarre, and some made us laugh out loud. Multiple people thought we should name the cards after the 3 Stooges. One person thought we should name them after “Media Center nerds with blogs”, and specifically listed Chris (2-tuner), Ian (4-tuner) and Ben (6-tuner). But in the end, the entry that made us laugh the most was:

Product Family Name: Wicked
* 2-tuner card name: Super
* 4-tuner card name: Super Duper
* 6-tuner card name: Super Duper Alley Ooper

Congratulations Charles Fraser, you too will be getting a free InfiniTV 4 in May! We debated this one a bit but Charles submitted some serious names as well so we decided it was ok to reward his creativity and his sense of humor!

But wait, there’s more … the even better news. We know you guys are very eager to get your hands on the first units that come off the production line so we’re launching an InfiniTV 4 Pre-Order Program effective today on Zones.com! What this means is that you can go to the link below and place your order today and you will be guaranteed to receive a unit from the first production run when they ship on May 31. You’ll need to enter all the typical order information to qualify -- including name, address and credit card number -- however your credit card will not be charged until the unit ships in May. You might not be familiar with Zones, but they’re a big online retailer that does a lot of business with large corporate customers as well as consumers.

Unfortunately, the pricing shown on Zones.com when it went live today (March 13) was incorrect. Zones is working to fix that now. Rest assured that the price remains $399, as we’ve said all along. If you go to Zones.com and see $478.99 that is incorrect and is not what you will be charged in May when the unit ships. We’re very sorry about the confusion and frustration that might have caused.

The InfiniTV 4 Pre-Order Program will only be available on Zones.com. The program won’t be available forever and initial quantities will be limited, so make sure you get your order in today!

Let’s talk about the fan. In the category of more good news, you’ll be happy to know the fan has been eliminated from the InfiniTV 4. How you ask? Well, it boiled down to some smart engineering that included power management which reduced the overall power requirements, the end result being no fan required! Also, temperature sensor data will now be accessible via the card’s admin page for the super geeks in the audience!

Can you clarify the issue with tuner sharing? We’ve seen some confusion and incorrect information online about network tuning and tuner sharing and we want to set the record straight so there’s no confusion. The Ceton InfiniTV 4 can utilize the network bridging capabilities in Windows 7 to expose the tuners to other PCs on your network. However, tuner sharing is actually not an allowed feature per the OCUR specification, which is required in order to be CableCARD-compatible. InfiniTV 4 can be used over a network with network bridging but in order to be compliant with the OCUR specification, all 4 tuners must be connected to the same PC. So, for example, you cannot use 2 of the InfiniTV 4 tuners on System A and the other 2 tuners on System B. By the way, this applies to any OCUR product and not just InfiniTV 4, regardless of whether or not network bridging is used or the device has Ethernet integrated.

In summary. So that’s the latest and greatest from Ceton. Like you, we’re very disappointed about the change in ship dates for InfiniTV 4 but we’re glad it’s a relatively short delay in the world of technology. We’re really excited about the new name and our naming contest winners. We are thrilled to launch the Pre-Order Program today (even with its hiccups). And we’re pretty darn pleased that we‘re able to eliminate the fan from the final version of the product and maintain our quality standards.

Thanks for your continued interest in Ceton and InfiniTV. Thanks for your enthusiasm and support. And thanks for your patience as we get InfiniTV out the door!

Cheers,

The Ceton Team

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