From my reading of it they wanted the content to be licensed out to 3rd party manufacturers who would then be able to bundle it / provide it to consumers in a v

From my reading of it they wanted the content to be licensed out to 3rd party manufacturers who would then be able to bundle it / provide it to consumers in a variety of different ways. CableCard (sorry if preaching to the choir here) was more about being able to build different hardware / software offerings around the same experience like you said. This did seem to open doors around what you ultimately wanted, but maybe I just read the article with my rose-colored glasses on :-)