I’ve only been in the STB business for seven years now but I’ve worked with people who are much more experienced than me. The death of the set-top box is predicted annually and I am afraid you have joined that long pantheon of people who have prematurely declared it deceased. I will now let you know why I am quite sure you are mistaken:<p>1) Set-top boxes aren’t a technological solution, they are a business solution. I know of one company who did actually eliminate them, but I am not aware of any other company who has followed their lead. The real essence of set-top box is about maintaining customer ownership. If the pay TV companies, and remember that a large portion of the market globally is satellite not cable, want to own their customer they have to own the access to content. Content access involves managing the user experience that the consumer sees, managing the programme guide, managing the channel numbers is an especially valuable business and managing interactivity.<p>2) Samsung has been in the set-top box business for a long time and they aren’t a dominant player in the sector. People see Samsung’s consumer electronics business and they see one big player, when in reality it is a conglomerate business with different leaders fighting for their budgets/resources/customers. The TV business has nothing to do with the set-top box business, nothing at all, they are completely different business units with different agendas and different tools. Samsung’s entry in to RDK is about as significant as that of Humax.<p>3) CableCARD: This is an predominantly American phenomena, in Europe there is the CI(+) CAM, but most Pay TV operators won’t allow it to be used because of the perceived security risks. The other interesting feedback I have from people who deal with the US market is that CableCARD is a PITA, so support is always going to be an issue.<p>4) All operators complain about the capital cost of set-top boxes, an asset that sits in the field and causes them support issues, but none of them want to dispose of them entirely. This is why the predominant trend in set-top boxes is towards thin clients with cloud services. Unfortunately copyright players have made the introduction of services in this area difficult. Add to that the USA’s fragmented local content offering the regional deployment of cloud services isn’t trivial.<p>Overall your post is very US centric and in my many years of travelling the globe working in television the one thing that I see as being constant: the USA is not typical of any other TV market. The USA has its own technology, its own legal problems and its own logistical problems.<p>While there might be an increase in cord cutting/shaving around the world the risk to cable operators is mainly for those that don’t adapt to the needs of the consumer. Those companies deserve to suffer, because nature as well as economics always shows us that those who don’t adapt die.