hi
there is nothing speciall about the cable tv in uk just begin of patching security now just after sky attack , in every countries deffected by chipset pairing and other security measures for keept a whole market stable they cant patch security just in sky and leave opened cable tv
and even if cable operator has still some boxes with externall smartcards - those smartcards will be replaced to the merlin and run with cak7 kernel at the beginning of next year or even at the end of current year , some people have done some of sattelite providers running with merlin but they are using old cwpk keys extracted from old receivers unfortunatelly almost all cable operators does not have old boxes with needed data to get so this will be totall game over with them :(
