Another element that might concern some companies, according to Cable Digital News, is a "monitor application" that the cable company uses to control how devices use processing resources.

ENGADGET: Cable ops, consumer electronics manufacturers sign agreement on tru2way roll out

Cable replacement may sound like an unsexy application.

FORBES: FedEx Bites Into Bluetooth

Imagine downloading a TNT program application directly from Turner rather than paying a cable company for access to Turner content.

FORBES: TV Cord-Cutters: Who You Are And Why You Scare Bigwigs

OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) would allow the cable company to download the same software to every CableCARD 2.0 host device regardless of the manufacturer.

ENGADGET: CableCARD 2.0: What's the hold up? HD

Cable's solution to this is middleware software originally called OpenCable Application Platform ( OCAP) and more recently renamed to simply: OpenCable.

ENGADGET: Time Warner Cable deploys 150k OpenCable STBs, aka CableCARD 2.0

The video on demand business is something they should stay away from and instead focus on everything they are good at, since they have an application platform and a burgeoning ad sales business, they could utilize this by offering cable operators and telcos a piece of the pie against a well defined TV interface with social interaction.

FORBES: $500 Billion TV Market New Battlefield For Internet Companies

In creating the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment report, input was collected from a variety of application spaces (servers, data center networks, high-performance computing, financial markets, carrier and cable operators, Internet exchanges, the scientific community, etc.) and from different geographic regions.

ENGADGET: IEEE pushes for Ethernet standard between 400Gbps and 1Tbps, hopes to head off big data crunch