The cable industry is requiring its members to use the plug on all digital boxes starting next year.
The new digital boxes require far more processing power than the conventional boxes now in about 30 million homes.
The digital boxes that will enable cable television systems to provide 500 channels have been slow to market.
Both are produced when a stream of X-rays is shot through the body onto a sheet of film or a digital box.
It's the kind of stuff that's going on now with digital set-top boxes and the Internet.
But the digital boxes have been late to market.
Not every company is going to wait for digital boxes to arrive.
In that period, digital boxes have constantly been three years or more away.
He tapped a cloth bundle with a small black digital box, which read 4757.
Time Warner, for example, is spending an estimated $400 million on new digital boxes.