Cable industry initiative to define open standards for interactive services over cable.
OpenCable is an initiative managed by the Advanced Platforms and Services group at CableLabs.
The project was begun in 1997 with the goal of helping the cable industry deploy interactive services over cable by defining standards for devices, encouraging supplier competition and creating a retail market for cable set-top boxes.
The project aims to address both a hardware and a software specification. The hardware specification allows a receiver that can be sold at retail to provide interoperability. The software specification aims to create a common platform upon which interactive services may be deployed and is called the OpenCable Applications Platform or OCAP.