I discerned three important nuggets from Roberts:

• Comcast will continue to invest in higher-bandwidth connections into homes.
• Comcast will invest in content more aggressively.
• Comcast will officially launch Hulu-competing Fancast.com by the year's end.

The first two points make a ton a sense. The third point is... well, miscalculated.

I am convinced Brian Roberts understands the challenges ahead. This is why Comcast and Time Warner (which also clearly "gets" it) have been aggressively pursuing a "TV Everywhere" model, which promises to give their subscribers exactly what they want: anytime, anywhere access to any TV content. They have to do this to keep their customer bases.

But in a TV Everywhere world, the role of the multi-system operator is diminished. Your cable or satellite TV provider will no longer be your only (legal) means of watching the current episode of HBO's Entourage. In a TV Everywhere world, Entourage will be available on literally thousands of websites and mobile apps, as long as you can authenticate yourself as a paying cable or satellite subscriber with the HBO package.

In this world, the value of Comcast as a content distributor is eroded. Comcast risks becoming a "dumb pipe," providing little more than bandwidth. To avoid that fate, Comcast recognizes that it needs to move upstream and own or control the content itself. This is why it will buy NBC in the next few months.

Moving upstream and investing in content is a smart move for Comcast.

Moving downstream and competing with Hulu via Fancast.com is a bad move. Here's why:

• Hulu already has a huge lead, having aggressively grown its audience for more than a year now.
• Hulu would be the ideal launching pad for TV Everywhere, because of its mega-loyal and passionate audience.
• Comcast is about to own a third of Hulu. Ad revenue from Hulu will ultimately end up back in Comcast's coffers.
• In a TV Everywhere world, thousands of websites will likely present the same TV content as Fancast.com. It will be a terribly crowded space, with a ton of noise. The sites that perform best will be the ones that create the best user experience for viewing TV content.
• Comcast has a poor track record with UI and user experience design. Need I compare more than Comcast DVR's UI to TiVo's UI?
• Strong consumer brands drive website traffic. Comcast has a horrendous consumer brand. Comcast users generally do not like being Comcast users.
• Comcast's interest is in the broadest distribution of TV content, not exclusive distribution. Locking up certain content for Fancast.com alone would be a mistake. Consumers would see it as a violation of their rights, akin to the Net Neutrality debate.

Comcast can survive (and perhaps prosper) through the death of cable-based TV, if it makes smart strategic decisions. That means focusing on where it provides the most value in the TV supply chain: Internet connectivity and content investment. Creating a content website that competes with its distributors is not a smart move.

Comcast should pull the plug on Fancast.com or simply use it as a TV Everywhere authentication testing site.

Guest author: Mike Berkley served as CEO of SplashCast Media from 2006 to 2009, pioneering the concept of social TV in partnership with Hulu. Berkley is currently involved in the TV Everywhere initiative, consults on product strategy for online media companies, and maintains the TV News Stream blog covering all things related to online premium video.

Authentication

Now, Comcast and Time Warner are about to start a trial with about 5,000 cable customers that would give these households access to TV programs on the web. Of course, the real test here is not whether the cable companies can deliver online TV over their networks, but whether they can figure out a good way to 'authenticate' households that have a cable subscription.

Spin: More Choice for Customers

As Om Malik points out, this also opens up the door for possible anti-trust proceedings against the large media companies that are involved here. For now, it looks like Comcast and Time Warner will be working together on this project (Time Warner uses the name TV Everywhere, Comcast calls its system "OnDemand Online"). In this limited first test, Comcast will carry some programming from Time Warner's TNT and TBS networks.

As expected, the cable companies are spinning this as an innovative agreement that will bring "customers exponentially more free content, more choice and more HD programming online as well as on TV." In reality, of course, this project is simply a way for the cable companies and networks to protect their revenue streams.

There is, however, also some truth to the cable companies' claims. A lot of cable networks do not put any of their content on the Internet, as the networks don't want to jeopardize the lucrative income stream they currently receive from the cable companies.

Hulu, the Elephant in the Room also Wants to Play

As of now, free TV programming online isn't going to go away anytime soon, but as PaidContent reports, Hulu, the most visible online TV site, is also looking into subscription models and the executives there might not be averse to joining the cable companies' authentication schemes. At some point in the future then, your cable subscription might determine which shows you can watch on Hulu and similar online TV sites.

Comcast's announcement tries to put this limit into context. According to Comcast, 250GB amount to:

• 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
• 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
• 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
• uploading 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

It's interesting that, judging from this, Comcast seems to add up uploads (photos) and downloads to get to these 250GB, making it an even smaller number - especially for those who upload large numbers of photos or videos, and, of course, for those who share a lot of files on Bittorrent. In Comcast's defense, the cap is agnostic to what service you use to burn up those gigabytes.

But Not if You Are a Power User

Comcast also cites that the median monthly usage be customer is 2-3GB a month. While some commentators have thought that this number is too low, we don't think it really is. For most broadband customers, broadband is simply always-on Internet. They don't necessarily make use of al the services available to them.

The problem here, however, is that the more advanced users also tend to use an exponentially larger amount of data. A standard movie might clock in at 2GB, but an HD movie can take easily take up more than 10GB.

It's All About Video

Also, these kind of limits are bound to stifle innovation in the streaming video business - and not even necessarily because people will start running out of bandwidth, but because there will always be a little voice that will keep nagging Comcast's users that they might be hitting the data cap if they download that movie.

We have to admit, though, that 250GB are a pretty high cap and, as Larry Dignan points out, it sure beats having metered Internet access. However, looking into the future, 250GB might be nothing once more people start using more data-intensive applications.

Will it be the end of the Internet as we know it, especially once other ISPs start announcing similar caps? Probably not - but it might just put a damper on the Internet we had envisioned for the future.

Flickr image courtesy of dmuth

BitTorrent accounts for a substantial percentage of traffic on the internet and some people believe it causes unfair slowdowns for web users doing anything else online. Many other people argue that ISPs have an obligation to treat all internet traffic equally regardless of content. This is a key battle in the Network Neutrality debate.

Comcast voluntarily stopped throttling in March, but today's FCC decision is important FCC Chair Kevin Martin says so that "consumers deserve to know that the commitment is backed up by legal enforcement." Martin, a Republican, is believed by some to be taking an out-of-charecter populist stance on the matter because he's preparing to run for a position in the US House of Representatives.

EFF Releases "Switzerland"

The Electronic Frontier Foundation today released software called "Switzerland" (as in, the neutral country) that can be used by consumers to test our networks for ISP interference.

The EFF explains:

"Switzerland is an open source, command-line software tool designed to detect the modification or injection of packets of data by ISPs. Switzerland detects changes made by software tools believed to be in use by ISPs such as Sandvine and AudibleMagic, advertising systems like FairEagle, and various censorship systems. Although currently intended for use by technically sophisticated Internet users, development plans aim to make the tool increasingly easy to use."

We'll keep our eyes peeled for a version of the tool that doesn't require using the command line, though every network in the land can now assume that it has users tech-savvy enough to be monitoring its behavior.

This quote from the EFF release puts things into context:

"The sad truth is that the FCC is ill-equipped to detect ISPs interfering with your Internet connection," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney. "It's up to concerned Internet users to investigate possible network neutrality violations, and EFF's Switzerland software is designed to help with that effort. Comcast isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, ISP to meddle surreptitiously with its subscribers' Internet communications for its own benefit."

What Do You Think?

The FCC's ruling was narrowly decided, through a 3 to 2 vote. Do you think ISPs have a legitimate interest in favoring some web traffic over others? On one hand, a future where big players get preferential treatment could cause a major slowdown in innovation. Startups and unknown application providers could be prevented from leveraging maximum bandwidth to offer new types of services to consumers. The most common example given is that YouTube may have struggled to make online video so common if they were discriminated against in their earliest days.

On the other hand, people downloading long lists of huge media files over common networks could be seen as an onerous drain on the "bandwidth commons." Slowing down an entire neighborhood's web use because you want to get the entire archives of some TV show is arguably pretty anti-social behavior.

Discussion above hasn't touched on legal matters, but for many people that's a big part of this debate as well. The US Congress, for example, voted this morning to require US colleges receiving federal funding to make commercial music purchasing services available to students online and filter traffic to deter P2P music sharing. The music industry says thank you! Some scientists using P2P on college campuses to transfer large files used in academic research, on the other hand, probably don't appreciate it as much. (That's probably not going on over the same networks, but the point is that there are very legitimate and important uses for P2P as well.)

We'd love to get our readers' thoughts on these questions - and for those of you able to put Switzerland to use, let us know if your ISP appears to be doing the same kinds of shady things that Comcast was slapped for today. These are going to be very big issues for the near-term future of the web.

Photo: Im in ur Internets by Jason Walton

Users Want ISPs Out of the Way

The plan for Plaxo at Comcast appears to be for the acquired company to power media publishing, sharing, lifestream aggregation and presumably contact management. The problem is that there's a whole market of alternatives for those services and many users just want their ISPs to deliver the damn internet so they can use it however they see fit.

Comcast has done a poor job of this lately. By engaging in a practice called "traffic shaping," whereby the company throttles down the bandwidth available for activities like media downloading, Comcast has made itself the poster child proving that network neutrality is a valid concern. How much further would things need to go before Comcast slows the user experience to a crawl when users seek to visit sites that compete with Comcast properties? The kind of lifestream aggregation that Plaxo offers is an emerging bandwidth hog - perhaps Comcast customers ought not be allowed to use lifestreaming apps other than Plaxo.

Likewise, you'd expect your address book to mind its own business - but that's not what Plaxo has been about traditionally. Email inboxes around the world used to be filled up with spammy requests for contact info from Plaxo. ("hi, this is Joe, could you update the contact info I have for you in Plaxo?") While the company's earliest reputation as one of the biggest scum-bags of the mainstream social web has been greatly softened lately by a very charming (and now wealthy) young exec named Joseph Smarr, the old tarnish is hardly gone from many peoples' minds. Some users complain that Plaxo is still spammy and some people in data portability circles, where nouveau hip geeks like Plaxo (and yours truly) hang out, say that Plaxo is still clearly doing what's best for Plaxo above all else.

Maybe big money on the table means never having to do more than say you're sorry, but the Plaxo deal with Comcast is liable to hit more bumps in the road than just an unpopular history.

Mismatched Visions, If Everyone's Telling the Truth

One-stop social web shopping at your ISP isn't an unusual vision at all. Plaxo's data portability talk seems at risk of going out the window for the relatively cheap price of $150m, though. Comcast is far more likely to want Plaxo to power a new line of Comcast branded social web services than they are to want their customers running links off-site to Yahoo and Google properties through their Comcast experience.

Given the histories of both companies, something devious is liable to happen. Perhaps though Comcast just wanted to acquire some human resources, including people who figured out how to spam the whole web for contact information and just a few short years later end up hated less than a telco. That is impressive, even if not enough to warrant trust from users.

AOL Video was one of the first places Hulu content appeared. Before anyone had even had a look at the Hulu beta test, videos from the service began showing up on AOL. The site is not the most attractive, however, and their content is not complete. For example, AOL video only has 6 episodes of NBC's "Chuck" -- Hulu itself offers 12. Their player is also generally lower quality than the one on Hulu, and clips can't be embedded.

However, the Hulu on AOL user does show nearly 5000 clips, with some of the most viewed receiving over 35,000 views. It may not be "Dick in a Box" on YouTube numbers, but there is no denying that Hulu is effectively getting its content out through the AOL channel. For the Hulu watcher, though, this is not your best option.

Video site Veoh just recently announced a partnership with Hulu began running Hulu content, though the site has no official partnership with Hulu. Their new TV Shows section, which offers access to 153 shows, is largely powered by Hulu. They too offer less content than Hulu itself, but unlike AOL they're using the actual Hulu player due to using embeds, so quality is higher and embedding by users is possible.

Generally, Veoh is a well designed site that is easy to navigate. The experience, because of the player, is a lot like Hulu. If you're already using Veoh for other things, then it is good place to watch Hulu content. Unfortunately, I was unable to get Hulu content to work through the downloadable Veoh player -- I kept getting an "unknown error." Because of that and the limited content selection, Veoh also probably isn't the best place to consume Hulu videos.

Launched last week, MSN Video Guide is the latest Hulu partner. The site is slick, but when it comes to actually navigating to specific episodes, it falls somewhere in between Veoh (good) and AOL (bad) in terms of usability. Unlike Veoh and AOL, MSN seems to have more Hulu content -- they actually list all 12 available episodes of "Chuck." Oddly, though, many of them arent't available, with the site insisting that "no airings of this episode were found in the next ten days." Huh? Many of the other episodes are only scheduled to be watchable for a short time (i.e., they have a notice like, "Available for 11 more days.")

When you actually do find an episode you can watch, MSN is wrapping it in a smaller player than the one Hulu uses. The result: lower quality and no way to embed -- or even rate and comment. For this reason, MSN is also not the best place to watch Hulu.

MySpace Primetime is where Hulu's catalog resides on the world's largest social networking site. They appear to have the entire Hulu catalog, and though they use their own player, it is better than the ones employed by AOL and MSN. Still though, it isn't up to par with Hulu's own player and embedding isn't allowed.

Hulu content on MySpace is framed in the way that all MySpace video is -- so commenting and rating is the same. Despite MySpace's huge audience, most of the Hulu content doesn't seem to be doing that well. Even for very popular shows like The Simpsons or K'ville (the most popular Hulu show on AOL Video), plays only number in the low hundreds on most clips. We can't help but think that if Hulu content were available on YouTube (the way some NBC content used to be), those hundreds of views would be hudreds of thousands.

The TV section at Fancast, a video web site from Comcast, is mostly powered by Hulu. Our "Chuck" test turned up 9 episodes -- more than AOL, but less than what is actually in Hulu's full catalog. At least we didn't find any videos that had expired or were scheduled to, though.

Fancast also uses its own player. It seems a little better in quality than MySpace (and leagues better than AOL), but still not quite up to par with Hulu. There also isn't any embedding and isn't much in the way of social feature (i.e., no commenting). Fancast might be a good choice for Comcast subscribers, but for anyone else, it isn't the best place to watch Hulu content.

OPENhulu

While Hulu is still in an invite only closed beta, some smart people realized that the clips on the site are embeddable. So in order to provide early access to the masses, a handful of sites offer the Hulu catalog via embeds. The most well-known of these is OPENhulu. The site recently received a cease and desist from Hulu and will be changing its name -- to what I'm not sure -- but it is still operational this morning.

Because the site is using embeds, it is using the Hulu player and thus offers more or less the same viewing experience as Hulu itself and, it would seem, the entire catalog without any weird time limits like MSN. Though covered in ads, the design of the site makes it easy to navigate and find videos. When the site changes names, it is also supposedly launching a redesigned version of the UI as well. For now, OPENhulu is the best way to watch Hulu content for anyone who can't get into Hulu itself.

We were, initially underwhelmed by Hulu. But by offering a high quality player, an easy to navigate web site, a large library of recent TV content, and the ability to embed videos, Hulu is beginning to win us over.

There is one thing that you can only get on Hulu: the guarantee that you're getting the most up-to-date library Hulu has to offer. Hulu's player also has at least one nifty feature that the embedded version doesn't offer, a dimmer that dims the rest of your browser screen to make the video stand out. Very cool.

For these reasons, Hulu itself unsurprisingly remains the best place to watch Hulu content.

Note: Hulu content is only available in the US, but some intrepid users have figured out how to trick the system and watch Hulu content outside the United States.