As others have pointed out, this means little as far as BluRay goes, but could be a fantastic development in terms of DIY PVR in the US and other countries that have 5c and copy-once protection on their broadcasts. Previously, you had to:
- Have a special tuner that was compatible with the CableCARD standard (there are around 2 or 3.) Also, I believe that these tuners only worked with Windows Media Center.
- Get Hauppage's HD-PVR box, which captured HD video from your cable box via component and encoded it into h264 streams via a hardware encoder.
- Get an HDFury and try to find an HDMI capture card.
All of these options were somewhat expensive, with the HD-PVR probably being the cheapest (still $200+) and you're unable to capture 1080p due to the limitations of component cables. The HDFury route allowed you to do what the HDCP crack does (as the whole premise of the HDFury is that it strips HDCP), but the key the HDFury was using could be revoked at any time, leaving you with a $200 brick.
What I see happening is a flood of HDMI capture cards with built-in IR blasters from Chinese manufacturers that don't decrypt HDCP out of the box, but allow the firmware to be flashed to enable it. The hardware would be capable of doing it, but lacks the master key, so simply flashing it with the proper key enables you to capture HDCP protected content. Or, quite possibly, they will just ship them with HDCP decrypting enabled by default, as the Chinese don't seem to care about our copyright laws (see the PSJailbreak clones flooding out of China in spite of the various international injunctions.)
Either way, I think by this time next year, you'll be able to get $50 HDMI capture cards that will let you record the full 1080p streams off of channels like HBO onto your homemade XBMC PVR.
