It’s been a long time since I can remember the Windows Media Center community being excited about a piece of hardware as it has about the Ceton quad CableCard tuner. The card was given an official release date of March 31st at CES. Unfortunately Ceton released a newsletter today with bad news in regards to the release date, but also with some good news.

Getting straight to the bad news, Ceton has pushed the release date to May 31st. No specific reasons were given for the delay.

There isn’t any single reason, or any major “show stoppers”, for why it’s taking us a bit longer than planned. It just boils down to a handful of small issues that are typical in new product development and that collectively add up. We’ve developed a first-of-its-kind product and that means we’re forging new ground in several areas, which always makes things a bit harder to plan for.

The news isn’t all bad though. Ceton did have three positive things to share in the newsletter. The first being that they have decided on a name for the product line. Their tuner family name is now called InfiniTV, with the quad tuner version be the InfiniTV 4. They had a naming contest back in January and due to being overwhelmed with over 1000 submissions they have decided to award not one, but three different people with a free InfiniTV 4 for their dedication and effort.

The next piece of good news is while you can’t get your hands on the InfiniTV 4 yet, you can at least pre-order one starting today. You will have to put in your credit card number, but Ceton assures us that your card will not be billed until your tuner is shipped on May 31st.

And last, but not least, Ceton has made some engineering changes to the card that have allowed them to remove the fan. You will no longer need to worry about any potential noise that the fan might have caused.

So while the delay in the ship date is disappointing, at least there is some good news to be happy about. Also, Ceton made it abundantly clear in the newsletter that they would be sticking to the May 31st date.