Not long after Clearwire announced their intent to begin lighting up a 4G LTE network, Sprint and a cabal of cable companies have begun to discuss the idea of a possible Clearwire acquisition.

Last we heard, Clearwire was waiting on $600 million in additional funding before any work on their LTE rollout could begin. Comcast, Time Warner, and Bright House are currently in talks with the nation’s third-largest wireless provider to get Clearwire the necessary funds to build out their LTE network.

Traction for Clearwire’s current WiMax offerings have slowed down considerably — no new WiMax markets have bee lit up this year — and Verizon’s 4G network is now said to cover half of the country’s citizenry. It would appear that the tacit agreement among Sprint and Co. is that LTE is crucial to competing in the mobile space.

What’s still up in the air are the exact mechanics of this investment. BusinessWire runs though a few possibilities: the companies in question could take the direct approach and buy out Clearwire completely, while another option has the cable companies investing through Sprint. Regardless of the process, if the deal goes through, it could be a win-win for all concerned parties.

Thanks to funding from the cable companies, Sprint gets access to a more competitve 4G network which should allow it to stand on firmer footing in comparison to rivals Verizon and AT&T. With Verizon moving at full steam with LTE and AT&T poised use T-Mobile to expand its reach, Sprint needs LTE just to stay relevant.

Sprint’s stance on wholesalers would benefit cable companies in the event Sprint ends up acquiring Clearwire: while Comcast and Time Warner already resell WiMax equipment from Clearwire under their own banners, Sprint’s wholesale agreements would allow cable companies to continue doing so albeit with the latest and greatest in network tech. The bottom line: more money in everyone’s coffers.

The deal isn’t yet official, but considering what it could mean for everyone involved, expect to hear about some serious negotiations in coming weeks.

The revamped app also has access to more shows. There are now 6,000 hours of content from 25 programmers available through the iOS app. Plus, just as before, the app can also change the channel and manage a user’s set-top boxes. Get it free here.

Comcast Now Brings Thousands of Hours of TV Shows and Movies to the iPhone and iPod touch for Free to Customers Through Its Xfinity TV App

Nearly 6,000 Hours of On Demand Content From 25 Programmers Now Available to Enjoy While On-the-Go or at Home; App Also Features New Personalization Capabilities

PHILADELPHIA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) today announced its digital subscribers using the Apple® iPhone® and iPod touch® now can stream thousands of hours of On Demand video on their devices through the company’s popular Xfinity TV® app, which has been downloaded more than two million times since it launched in November. Beginning today, customers using these devices and the iPad® can download a new version of the Xfinity TV app, and have access to a vast collection of entertainment in the palm of their hands for free.

“Our development team will continue to add even more choices and personalized options to the Xfinity TV app, giving our customers access to the entertainment they want, where and when they want it.”
Comcast introduced On Demand content for viewing both inside and outside of the home on the iPad in February. During the past three months, Comcast has nearly doubled the amount of entertainment available to stream through the app, now totaling almost 6,000 hours. To reach this milestone, Comcast has recently added several new programmers, bringing in top video selections from 25 content partners.

“Whether our customers are relaxing around the house or traveling around the country, we’re bringing them a huge selection of great content at their fingertips, all for free,” said Matt Strauss, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Comcast Interactive Media. “Our development team will continue to add even more choices and personalized options to the Xfinity TV app, giving our customers access to the entertainment they want, where and when they want it.”

The ability to view On Demand content on the iPhone and iPod touch now enables customers to watch Xfinity TV offerings across Apple’s smartphone and computer product lineup. Users of Mac® products can view thousands of movies and hit TV shows through Comcast’s Xfinity TV online destination, www.XfinityTV.com, also for free.

This latest release of the app is the fourth significant update since it launched only seven months ago. Additional enhancements have also been incorporated into this version to help further personalize the customer’s experience, including enabling users to filter their content choices by genre and network. For first-time users, the app will automatically populate with the customer’s channel lineup, eliminating the need for a manual set up process.

In addition to these features and its On Demand video streaming capabilities, the Xfinity TV app also can be used as the ultimate remote control and discovery tool – it gives users the ability to browse and discover content across multiple platforms, whether it be available on online, On Demand or on TV; change TV channels in real time; and remotely program and manage multiple DVRs at home.

Comcast will continue to expand the features and functionality of the Xfinity TV app and add even more content on a continual basis. To learn more about the Xfinity TV app, please visit www.xfinity.com/tvapp.

Comcast donated $18,000 to a non-profit filmmaker’s group, the ReelGrrls, dedicated to giving young girls a voice and more confidence through film-making. One of the members expressed concern over the upcoming NBC/Comcast merger on Twitter, stating her disbelief that the FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker just quit to move to Comcast after approving the merger.

Almost immediately one of Comcast’s media relations people, Steve Kipp, pulled the funding:

Given the fact that Comcast has been a major supporter of Reel Grrls for several years now, I am frankly shocked that your organization is slamming us on Twitter. I cannot in good conscience continue to provide you with funding — especially when there are so many other deserving nonprofits in town.”

Bang. There you go. Step on the dragon’s tail and you get the horns, right? Let that be a lesson to brave young women everywhere: be quiet or you won’t get the money.

Luckily, according to the Washington Post, someone higher up at Comcast contacted the group and, explaining that Steve was wrong, said:

“We are in the process of reaching out to ReelGrrls in Seattle and let them know the funding the organization has received from Comcast is not in jeopardy and we sincerely apologize for the unauthorized action of our employee,” Fitzmaurice said. “This is not the way Comcast behaves toward its nonprofit partners.”

All’s well that end’s well, it seems. However, this sort of ridiculous reactivity by a corporate sponsor, especially one as execrable as Comcast, is ridiculous and the back-pedaling shows just how poisonous most media conglomeration really is.

Comcast isn’t exactly known to be friendly with the downloaders or streamers. In the past they’ve limited and even blocked seeding of torrent files. The term throttling was synonymous with Comcast a few years back. The company eventually entered into a partnership with BitTorrent, Inc and was later asked by the FCC to stop the practices, but perhaps the company just moved to block specific sites in an effort to kill the bandwidth-sucking practice of torrenting.

Like TorrentFreak I ran a couple of quick network checks on ThePirateBay from my Comcast connection and traceroutes and pings come back kosher. As of 9:30am EDT I could not access ThePirateBay on my main desktop computer. I then grabbed a Verizon Xoom, which also failed to connect to the site when on WiFi mode. However, when using Verizon 3G, the site loads without an issue.

So what’s a torrent-addicted Comcast subscriber supposed to do? Well, good friend, I have some solutions for you. First, freeproxyserver.net is a quick and dirty way around the blockage. But you might also want to look at — damn, I’m going to break a rule here — usenet. That’s all I’m going to say because like that other place, the first rule of usenet is not to talk about usenet. You could also look into more discrete torrent sites as ones with private trackers and strict rules generally fly under the radar.

Comcast has yet to comment on this issue and they might never. Everything is pure speculation without an official Comcast statement. Perhaps the site will suddenly work again for Comcast subs. Funny how that works sometimes, eh?

In other Comcast related news, this just happened mere months after this.

Update: Comcast reached out and indicated that they are not blocking the site, and reminded, as mentioned above, the site is not accessible from other ISPs either. They link to this part of their FAQ page, which indicates that they do not block peer-to-peer traffic although that was never part of the original argument as the torrent traffic goes through fine, it’s just access to the site that was limited.

Other, more important people than me will be objecting to this, I’m sure, but I just wanted to put down for the record here how incredibly inappropriate this obviously is.

Funnily enough, she criticized the merger process as taking too long. I wonder why!

Surprisingly, in these select markets, Comcast will provide and install TiVo Premiere units but the On Demand service will be available on units sold at retail as well. According to the press release, “Comcast will install TiVo Premiere set-top boxes with its cable service at no additional charge” although monthly pricing wasn’t announced.

This move does cement the TiVo Premiere as the leading 3rd party set-top DVR. There isn’t another set-top box from even service providers that offer so much content through one user interface. The TiVo Premiere features complete access to digital cable through Cable Cards as well as online offerings such as Netflix, Blockbuster and Amazon, and now select units can stream from Comcast’s robust On Demand library. Now if only TiVo can finish the HDUI so there’s a bit of continuity throughout the service.

TiVo and Comcast Team Up to Offer the First Retail Cable Set-Top With DVR That Delivers Linear TV, Broadband Content and Xfinity On Demand Library All From One Box

Comcast to Help TiVo to Promote Solution With Retail and Marketing Support

ALVISO, CA and PHILADELPHIA, PA–(Marketwire – May 9, 2011) – TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services and advertising solutions for digital video recorders (DVRs), and Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ: CMCSA) (NASDAQ: CMCSK), one of the nation’s leading providers of entertainment, information, and communications products and services, today announced they have entered into an agreement to enable access to Comcast’s robust library of Xfinity TV On Demand content on TiVo Premiere set-top boxes sold at retail. For the first time, Comcast customers in select markets will be able to use a TiVo Premiere box to enjoy a fully integrated offering of On Demand programs, along with linear television and a range of broadband services, all accessible through TiVo’s user interface and intuitive search capabilities.

Under the agreement, Comcast will make its Xfinity TV On Demand service accessible on TiVo Premiere set-top boxes in many of its largest markets, with the first expected to be the San Francisco Bay Area with a plan for additional markets to follow. In each of those markets Comcast and TiVo plan to partner on promotion of this new service in retail and other sales channels. Comcast will install TiVo Premiere set-top boxes with its cable service at no additional charge for its customers when the service is available in those markets.

“Adding Comcast’s On Demand library to TiVo Premiere is a fantastic win for consumers because it will offer access to the ultimate television viewing experience with the programming viewers want. Traditional TV channels, On Demand and broadband delivered content will all be accessible with TiVo’s universal search capability and TiVo’s stunning HD user-interface,” said Tom Rogers, President and CEO of TiVo Inc. “And, this partnership will make it easy for our mutual customers to enjoy both their TiVo service and Comcast’s Xfinity TV with the more than 25,000 On Demand programs it offers along with the ease of Comcast arranged installation.”

“We’re pleased to combine Comcast’s industry leading On Demand library with the innovative TiVo experience and provide our customers even more choice and convenience,” said Marcien Jenckes, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Video Services for Comcast. “Working with TiVo to allow customers to access our Xfinity TV On Demand service complements our commitment to bring any content to any device, at any time.”

Across town we hear talk of hardware acceleration linking up with Android to make Flash finally usable on every other device. This would be a good thing for Flash fans, who can make the argument that more devices will work with Flash than won’t. But in the new world of network broadcasting, the show’s over for Flash. Nobody cares what makes the picture dance on the screen, just that it does.

Instead, we care whether it streams or it doesn’t. Live streaming may seem to be about Ustream v. YouTube, about watching the Wedding or GaGa or whatever trending stream is hitting your push notification buffer. But it’s also about your own personal broadcast stream, formerly known as the telephone. Video calls are finally here, and the broadcasters who dither too long about iPad streaming will be in the same kind of trouble Microsoft is in with Windows.

The same way that we don’t care about Flash, we don’t care about the distinction between streaming phone calls and on-demand shows. One is about some idiot wasting your time, and the other… Same thing. The same dynamics that Comcast has finally ratified are moving into the phone call. Cable subs are up for those who support iPad access, down for those who don’t. Time Warner and Cablevision softened up the studios, and Comcast came in and closed.

Similarly, FaceTime softened up the carriers by introducing a service that obliterated the need for international plans. Those of us who switched to Verizon are out of luck until iPhone 5 anyway for a global phone, so the calculation on a trip to Europe is to get a throwaway phone for the trip from the airport to the hotel and WiFi. And before you say that FaceTime doesn’t work over 3G, Skype video does. The next time you Update All on your iPhone, you’ll see what I mean.

On this week’s Gillmor Gang, Danny Sullivan suggests it’s an extra download and besides people don’t want to have to put on makeup to answer the phone (I’m paraphrasing, or just trying to embarrass Danny gratuitously, or maybe myself for carrying blush at all times.) Twitter is an extra download for now, but the second they jump on video calls using their directory this will be a feature not a hassle.

When the smaller market of international travelers becomes enamored of video calls, we see another Netflix-style hockey stick. WiFi becomes a differentiator for choice of hotel and event venues, for coffee shops and restaurants, for sporting events and rock concerts. All of a sudden your phone and tablet becomes your portal to personal and professional incoming pings, a push notification router filtered by your business and location rules.

How long did it take for Comcast to make this deal? Time Warner released its iPad software less than two months ago, were sued by Comedy Central a week later, and were fast followed by Cablevision as though to say, no we really mean this, 10 days after that. It became clear in a New York minute that people wanted more stuff for their new iPad 2′s, and oh wait, iPad 2′s have a camera. Then ABC, the last of the original big three, capitulates to Comcast, and oh, wait, that’s Steve Jobs’ network.

Why would Jobs want to play the Disney card now, except for the fact that iPad 2 sales are going to skyrocket once the pipeline recovers from not being able to make them fast enough. You only have to experience a Skype video call once to want FaceTime to work over 3G, and Skype is softening up the carriers just as they move off flat rate to a profit center for streaming. You may not have been paying attention to the 5 gig limit before now, but the Comcast on-demand steaming at home and Skype push notifications on the go will stoke demand, as it were.

Apple already is making the case for a Comcast moment with the carriers by rudely interrupting Skype calls when a carrier call comes in. The Skype call is put on hold (at least on Verizon) and you have to cancel the push notification and decline the incoming call before returning to your video call. Perhaps Jobs is looking for some competition from AT&T to differentiate from Verizon as they have done with simultaneous call and data. Perhaps the lure of selling a higher priced video cap will close the deal.

Android has a real problem here that Google is attempting to fix by offering on-demand video over YouTube. Android’s video service is just now making its way into some builds, but the combination of pro and amateur streaming video offered by Apple will be hard to overcome. Not that it needs to be, because compatibility between the two major platforms will come at the cost of paving over Flash permanently.

As Gigaom notes Netflix’s (global) subscriber base is now bigger than Comcast’s national one, a happenstance that should send fear into the hearts of cable providers everywhere. The numbers came from an earnings call today.

In this past quarter, Netflix reached 23.6 million subscribers, up from 14 million last year. We know that Comcast ended 2010 with 22.8 million subscribers and assuming at even a significant uptick in subscriber numbers, we can assume that Netflix is on parity or has surpassed Comcast’s base.

Netflix also hit $719 million in revenue and expects to have 24 million subscribers by the end of Q2.

Comcast is about to nationally roll out its 105Mbps (!) Internet service. The ISP hopes to have the service in several of its top markets, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, and Miami, bringing the total number of potential subscribers up to 40 million. Considering so much of legitimate media consumption these days is based on streaming, having a super fast Internet connection will only help to a point.

I remember when I ordered Cablevision’s 101Mbps service two years ago, and the tech that installed it told me flat out, “You’re going to be faster than the services you’re trying to tap into.” YouTube was still dog slow, for example. In fact, the only time I’ve regularly topped out the connection, which costs $99 per month (to Comcast’s $105 per month), is when using BitTorrent or Usenet.

Comcast says a 4GB iTunes download takes about four minutes with the service. That sounds about right, given my own experience.

The only issue, of course, is if Comcast decides to implement bandwidth caps. What’s the point of having a 105Mbps connection if you’re given a ceiling?

So, Apple does a lot of things right. The Apple TV and iTunes combo offers an “it just works” environment that many people seem to like. So why are they having trouble getting their video content out? Recent market research from the NPD group shows that Apple’s iTunes video delivery is in a three-way tie for third place at only 4% market share, while Netflix is way ahead at 61% and Comcast is second at 8%.

Apple has been in the video business since 2006; in 2008, they began to offer rentals, which seemed to help somewhat; and in 2010, iTunes started to carry $0.99 TV shows rentals. This recipe should have their numbers a bit higher than 4%, right — given their dominance in the music sector? Just as iTunes and Apple TV make for a convenient way to sync media across the network for people who own them, it’s also much more convenient to use Netflix on one of the many streaming devices out there. This of course is due to Netflix’s expansion into streaming boxes like Boxee and Roku, and offering playback on all three of the big gaming systems. They still do physical rentals, but that is declining in favor of streaming.

What’s even more interesting is that Netflix streaming doesn’t even have the best selection of movies, but people love it anyways. The survey found that customers know iTunes has more up-to-date content, but the convenience of Netflix ranked highest in terms of “overall shopping experience” and “value for price paid.” Once again, it’s the convenience. It doesn’t make sense for someone to buy an Apple TV if they own any game system at all, even after Apple lowered the price to $99.

In order for Apple to be successful, they need to have it make sense for someone to use the iTunes Store, and that won’t happen unless they open it up to more devices, just as Netflix did. But I think we all know that’s not likely to happen.

Mr. Comcast, CEO Brian Roberts, is touring around this fine country on a bit of mission. Among a broad message that includes a big push for the company’s On Demand service, it seems he wants people to know Comcast has this fancy new thing called an iPad app.

ZDnet quotes him at a Morgan Stanley conference talking about this app and the company’s focus on connectivity,

Let’s switch now to the screen and you can start here, this is a regular iPad. It’s authenticated once. So it knows that it is Philadelphia cable customer — this is our head of investor, Marlene’s, cable. So if I picked a channel — let’s pick CNN — if I click it, it will say at the top — and it depends what network you’re on — this is running on WiFi in the hotel so hopefully it will be pretty good. But that’s another thing that came together, which is WiFi in all of our homes. We’re now putting WiFi in every new cable modem we put out there.

So the last foot, in my opinion, wants to be wireless with the latest and greatest device. But you need a wireless connection to get the best broadband experience. And that is what we offer in people’s homes.

Sounds about right. The app works great and is hopefully hints at what the cable giant has in store down the road. But the man also brought up Netflix when talking to Bloomberg. Uh-oh.

What we have successfully done is created a user interface that is every bit as good [as Netflix]. It will get better over time. We now have more content. We spend $7.5 billion a year procuring content, so we should be able to have those kind of rights, both library rights, and more importantly, live here and now rights and I think you will see a lot of innovation this year from Comcast.

As both a Comcast and Netflix sub, Comcast does have a good deal of content, but the interface and user experience is no where near as satisfying. The UI hasn’t changed…ever. It’s still the slow and tedious system as when it first rolled out. Content is king, sure, but I can’t be the only person instantly turned off by a bad experience. However, Comcast’s huge install base gives them the liberty of doing whatever the hell they want. There’s no need to innovate or WOW customers when a feature such as On Demand is simply provided alongside current cable services. It’s there, it’s free, so people are going to use it.

Mr. Roberts is expected to be on more talk shows before too long. Comcast is out to show they have the goods people want.

UFC has joined the growing list of sports organizations that have gone 3D. This Thursday’s event, broadcast live on the Versus network from Louisville, will be the company’s first 3D broadcast. It’s headlined by Diego Sanchez (seen here looking menacing) and Martin Kampmann.

The event will air in 3D on various affiliates throughout the country, most notably Comcast’s new Xfinity 3D channel. (The channel launched in late February.)

The 3D broadcast will be put together by an entirely different production team. Former WEC announcer Todd Harris will be on the 3D play-by-play team, as will Kevin Florian.

In other 3D news, the other big, all-3D network, 3net, will start something called “3net 3Day Weekends” this Friday. It will feature 3D programming premieres and the like. The first such program will be Nascar 3D: The Imax Experience, narrated by Keifer Sutherland—sounds like a treat.

At the very least the few who bought 3DTVs now have a couple of channels to tune into.

Launched just yesterday, Comcast’s Xfinity 3D will be a new full-time 3D TV channel offering up a big mix of content from music and sports to movies and original programming. Xfinity 3D joins ESPN 3D, n3D and 3net as full-time 24/7 3D content providers and they kicked off their premiere with an NHL hockey game between the Montreal Canadiens and the Calagary Flames. After the game, Kings of Leon played it out from Germany. This channel reminds me of HDnet, one of the first channels to be full-time HD, before many others joined. Does this mean that more 3D channels will come out and be full-time?

Not only does LittleBigPlanet 2 come out today, but the FCC approved the merger between Comcast and NBC Universal. Will the two companies use their combined powers for good and not evil? A healthy skepticism may be in order.

The merger cleared the FCC with a 4-1 a few moments ago. The merger was initially announced in late 2009, but its approval was held up because the FCC wanted to ensure that the merger wouldn’t wreak havoc with things like consumer choice when it comes to content consumption.

The Free Press, the watchdog group that criticized the FCC for passing only a “lite” form of Net Neutrality, has similar misgivings with regard to the merger.

Today’s decision by the FCC represents a failure of the agency to live up to its own public interest mandate, as well as Barack Obama’s promise to promote media diversity and prevent excessive media concentration. This deal will give Comcast unprecedented control over both media content and the physical network that delivers it. The FCC has opened Pandora’s Box, and we can soon expect a whole new swarm of mega-mergers that will have dire consequences for media and the Internet.

Such power concentrated in the hands of a single company is deeply troubling. Access to information from a variety of independent sources is essential to an informed citizenry and a functioning democracy. While the FCC has adopted conditions, they are insufficient short-term or voluntary fixes that will fail to prevent permanent harm to competition, consumer choice and the future of the Internet. This deal will drive up cable and Internet costs for subscribers, while further eliminating diverse, independent media content that is already woefully lacking in the commercial media….

Today, Comcast has won the jackpot, and once again, it is the American people who will end up paying out.

Harsh words, to be sure.

Comcast is expected to host a press conference at 4pm ET to “to discuss the Federal Communications Commission’s and Department of Justice’s clearance of the Company’s joint venture with General Electric related to NBC Universal.” We’ll see if the company will address any of these concerns.

Similar to the iPhone app, Tunerfish for Android allows people to share with a single click what they are watching, on their social network(s) of choice. Tunerfish also displays which TV shows are trending among your friends, which gives users a way to discover shows they are not yet familiar with. And users are encourages to check-in to shows and movies.

While TV check-ins via Tunerfish in October were up 500% compared with July, the site has only seen 60,000 check-ins in October, compared to the millions of check-ins per month that GetGlue, a competitor, is currently seeing per month. But the Comcast-NBC deal could help Tunerfish out in terms of partnerships.

Comcast this morning announced that it has doubled the amount of movies available on demand that were released the same day as the DVD in 2010, offering customers more than 200 “same-date movies” this year alone.

The company also revealed that its On Demand service reached a total of 18 billion views, this year (that is: the total number of views since the service was launched with a few hundred choices back in 2003).

This year, Comcast says, customers viewed content On Demand 4 billion times, with an average of 350 million views on the service every month.

Today, Comcast works with a number of studios to bring same-day-as-DVD movies to its customers, including Warner Bros/New Line, Fox, Universal, Sony and MGM.

Comcast says movies available the same day as its DVD release continue to rise in popularity and are consistently among the top-performing content available On Demand.

Customers can now select from 25,000 choices On Demand, including 6,000 in HD. This ranges from new release movies and TV shows to kids, sports, lifestyle and local programs.

This certainly changes things. You’ll recall that the Internet flipped out the other day when it emerged that Netflix‘s traffic carrier, Level 3, said that Comcast was taking advantage of its position as one of the nation’s largest ISPs by demanding more coin to pass on Netflix traffic to its customers. It is, in fact, largely boring tosh, but it speaks to something we’ve been talking about for some time. That is, of course, Net Neutrality, which I tend to capitalize for some reason, almost imbuing it with a greater sense of importance. No matter, for nor Comcast has told its side of the story, and things are quite different in its recollection of events.

Comcast, feeling some FCC heat, says that this particular incident is truly nothing more than a plain ol’ commercial dispute. This isn’t Comcast playing the heel, tap-dancing all over the principles of Net Neutrality. In fact, you might even say that Comcast is the victim here.

I know the idea of Comcast being any sort of victim won’t sit well with many folks on the Internet—Comcast’s past behavior certainly won’t be forgotten for some time yet—but it’s important to at least listen to what it has to say before calling for whatever.

Here’s Comcast, verbatim:

Level 3 has low-balled its way into a new business deal that will significantly increase the amount of Level 3′s traffic Comcast would carry. and suddenly wants to seriously disrupt settled economics of Internet traffic to meet its new business plan. Its position is not based on any principles of fair play on the Internet, but instead is merely the result of its rash bid to carry Netflix traffic at radically low rates, based on the flawed assumption that it could use its Tier 1 Internet backbone status to cram its CDN traffic onto others’ networks on a settlement-free basis.

In other words, Level 3 won Netflix’s business by promising it a sweetheart deal that it was in no position to deliver. Then it turns to Comcast and says, “Oh hai. We need you to deliver a megaton more traffic than we’ve ever asked before. Please comply as soon as possible. You don’t want to be accused of being anti-Net Neutrality, do you?”

Comcast, not wanting to look like a jerk (particularly when it’s trying to give Washington regulators the impression that it’s a force for good—NBC Universal won’t come easily), tried its best to accommodate Level 3′s request (Comcast “was able to scramble and provide Level 3 with six ports (at no charge) that were, by chance, available and not budgeted and forecasted for Comcast’s wholesale commercial customers”), even though it had no contractual reason to do so.

All of this means—again, if Comcast is being truthful here—that Comcast is not quite the boogeyman that it’s so often portrayed as.

Which brings us back to Net Neutrality. Perhaps Level 3 thought it could ride the wave of popular support for Net Neutrality—I’m still not convinced that Net Neutrality is “controversial” in any sense of the word—by invoking memories of Comcast’s past behavior. Here’s Netflix, one of the new darlings of the Internet, showing us just how much Streaming Is The Future, being bullied by big bad Comcast. (Let’s ignore the fact that all of this bandwidth has to come from somewhere—you surely can’t expect to pay the same amount ore month for Internet access as someone who only uses their connection to check Facebook when you’re streaming Netflix movies all day long.) Only that wasn’t the case at all.

Again, maybe. This all assumes Comcast isn’t leaving out certain details in order to look good.

All of this, just so you can watch Eat, Pray, Love on demand.

First, let’s understand how data gets from the cloud to you. Back in the old days, when you wanted serve something on the web you rented a T1 line, set up a machine, and hoped someone would arrive to view your wares. This server, in turn, connected to a backbone and then ISPs – which used to be small mom and pop shops offering dial-up and are now faceless corporations – gave that data to you. It’s like a series of tubes, you know? That was before sites like Slashdot and Digg created a massive surging effect on popular content and the general public thought it would be nice to watch movies on their television via the Internet. As a result, digital traffic rose to alarming rates and everyone involved – from the dude with the T1 line to the T1 line providers to the person at home using a cable modem – had to upgrade. And upgrade. And upgrade. To put this in perspective, we only really had this problem for the past decade or so and the technology has improved so quickly it’s almost like the carriers are sprinting – and they are. In turn, it makes the 30 year move from Public Switch Telephone Networks (which were partially mechanical) to digital switching of telephone calls look like a leisurely walk from New York to Antarctica.

So this stuff costs a lot of money and carriers didn’t do it out of the kindness of their hearts. They want to be paid for their data centers. That’s where Level 3 comes in. Level 3 acts as both a backbone – meaning a massive, nationwide carrier of data – and a Content Delivery Network. Back in the old days, the backbone would be the only thing on the net. But once it became clear that hosting all your data on one server was a bad idea, CDNs grew up and allowed content providers to cache their data in different physical locations. You’d hit one CDN in California and I’d hit one in New York. Things worked faster that way.

CDNs also became massive sources of traffic but they didn’t have many network resources so they tried to pay less to deliver their traffic as a “service” rather than an “insurance policy.” Now in a perfect world my bits are worth as much as Netflix’s bits. And, for the most part, that’s true. But when Comcast sees Level 3 as a CDN, things change. Here’s what Comcast said:

Comcast has long established and mutually acceptable commercial arrangements with Level 3′s Content Delivery Network (CDN) competitors in delivering the same types of traffic to our customers. Comcast offered Level 3 the same terms it offers to Level 3′s CDN competitors for the same traffic. But Level 3 is trying to gain an unfair business advantage over its CDN competitors by claiming it’s entitled to be treated differently and trying to force Comcast to give Level 3 unlimited and highly imbalanced traffic and shift all the cost onto Comcast and its customers.

To quantify this, what Level 3 wants is to pressure Comcast into accepting more than a twofold increase in the amount of traffic Level 3 delivers onto Comcast’s network — for free. In other words, Level 3 wants to compete with other CDNs, but pass all the costs of that business onto Comcast and Comcast’s customers, instead of Level 3 and its customers.

Level 3′s position is simply duplicitous. When another network provider tried to pass traffic onto Level 3 this way, Level 3 said this is not the way settlement-free peering works in the Internet world. When traffic is way out of balance, Level 3 said, it will insist on a commercially negotiated solution.

Here’s what Level 3 said:

“On November 19, 2010, Comcast informed Level 3 that, for the first time, it will demand a recurring fee from Level 3 to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’s customers who request such content. By taking this action, Comcast is effectively putting up a toll booth at the borders of its broadband Internet access network, enabling it to unilaterally decide how much to charge for content which competes with its own cable TV and Xfinity delivered content. This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access markets as the nation’s largest cable provider.

“On November 22, after being informed by Comcast that its demand for payment was ‘take it or leave it,’ Level 3 agreed to the terms, under protest, in order to ensure customers did not experience any disruptions.

“Level 3 operates one of several broadband backbone networks, which are part of the Internet and which independent providers of online content use to transmit movies, sports, games and other entertainment to consumers. When a Comcast customer requests such content, for example an online movie or game, Level 3 transmits the content to Comcast for delivery to consumers.

So Comcast is all like “They’re a CDN!” while Level 3 is all like “They’re strong-arming us! They’re anti-competitive!” Well, they’re both right.

To be fair, Level 3 is a CDN. However, it is also the world’s largest backbone. It’s akin, to use the series of tubes analogy, a sewer operator offering special toilets that can really blow through the system very quickly for folks with those sorts of… needs. The sewer is the backbone while the super-toilets are the CDNs. Where, then, is the line drawn? Should Level 3 pay twice for the same traffic it would carry anyway? CDNs like Akamai already pay Comcast CDN rates, after all. And can Comcast prevent folks from gaining the benefits of those special super toilets, especially if they have their own super toilets to sell?

Now, if you read Comcast’s side, they’re saying “Level 3 is a CDN. They want to serve popular, populous data. They need to sign a new contract.” while Level 3 says nothing has changed. Comcast also suggests that Level 3′s content is clogging up its tubes. After all, movies are bigger than emails, right?

Wrong. What Comcast is really doing is holding a certain set of bits hostage. Level 3 does act like a backbone and it is an extremely important backbone. Anything you do online probably touches Level 3 at some point. Therefore, to force Level 3 to pay what a CDN does to blow content through Comcast’s network is non-competitive, one of the problems that net neutrality hopes to prevent. In fact, given the value of Internet connectivity to the average user, Comcast could do itself a favor and offer faster, better service to its current subscribers for a little more money instead of shaking down Level 3 (and then probably shaking us down by telling us it can offer “Gold++ Netflix Streaming Service” for $50 a month). As it stands, cable and DSL service is abysmally slow and underperforming in the first place. Clearly Comcast needs to get its own house in order before crying victim.

This is the worst kind of inside baseball because the players don’t induce much sympathy in the first place and there’s another game going on called Net Neutrality and it, too, is delightfully unpalatable. A bit is a bit is a bit, says the NN crowd while the ISPs see themselves as aggrieved sherpas, forced to carry the rich man’s heavy gear alongside the poor man’s light gear. However, everyone should, in theory, pay the same for the same service. In practice, it’s cases like this that will help decide who pays whom for what and, as we all know, we’ll end up paying in the end.

Tunerfish allows people to share with a single click what they are watching, on their social network(s) of choice in real time. Much like Twitter does for tweets, Tunerfish also displays which TV shows are trending among your friends (in the last hour, 24 hours, etc.), which gives users a way to discover shows they are not yet familiar with. The site also encourages people to check-in to shows on both its web-based app and iPhone app, much like you would in Foursquare or Gowalla.

The UI of Tunerfish has been updated to provider a sleeker, more user-friendly interface, making it easier to share, to comment, and to start or join a conversation. Previously, the only way to sign up for Tunerfish was via your Facebook or Twitter account but now you can register and sign-in via the conventional email/password combination.

Tunerfish’s iPhone app has been updated with pull-to-refresh updates and an option to share the awards you earn from the service with your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.

So how is Tunerfish doing five months out? TV check-ins via Tunerfish in October were up 500% compared with July. But the site has only seen 60,000 check-ins in October, compared to the millions of check-ins per month that GetGlue, a competitor, is currently seeing per month. But Tunerfish’s John McCrea says that “with any new social app, it is the month-over-month growth that one wants to see.”

275,000 Comcast subscribers cut the cord last quarter. Its subscriber count is down 3.5% from the same quarter last year. To be fair, some of that loss was offset by a gain in 219,000 digital cable subs. Revenue was up as customers bought higher priced bundles of tv, internet and phone service.

During the earnings call, Comcast blamed the drop on the lousy economy. Always a handy excuse. Sure, many people are struggling right now, and it makes sense that the high cost of cable is an expense they can no longer afford. Comcast said, based on exit interviews, only a ‘small number‘ seemed to cut the cord for over-the-air signals, and they are not planning to switch to internet tv alternatives.

Comcast’s exit interviews run counter to other reports. MediaMall Technologies, maker of PlayOn, digital media server software that let’s you watch over-the-top video on TV, says 30% of it’s customers have canceled cable after using its software. Perhaps they weren’t Comcast customers? MediaMall Technologies estimates its customer base saves $24 million a year in cable fees.

Boxee’s CEO made the point on CNBC yesterday that his box won’t necessarily lead to cord cutting. “Instead, it will usher in a generation of people that never get cable.” He predicts with Boxee, they won’t see the point in cable, just like young people don’t see the point in a landline phone.

The CEO of Verizon, Ivan Seidenberg made the same point last month, saying young people are “not going to pay for something they don’t need to.” He also says “over the top is going to be a pretty big issue for cable.”

Another company to keep an eye on is Clicker. It launched a year ago at TechCrunch50. Clicker bills itself as “the simple way to find, share and watch TV online.” Many viewers agree, based on feedback to my earlier post.

And one more thing. No, not Apple. Actually Yahoo. You don’t hear much about new products at Yahoo. It took the tech community 20 hours to notice Yahoo Mail’s first redesign in five years. But, 600 million user strong Yahoo has a product called Yahoo Connected TV, which gets you access to movies, tv shows, and other web services. It’s already built into TV’s from Samsung, Sony, LG, Vizio, and Toshiba. Crunchgear reviewed it last year.

I haven’t even touched on mobile and DVRs vs Live. Maybe a future post.
But, you can’t tell me cable tv is not an industry being disrupted. Not overnight, but now live on tv.