The big news today is the deal announced between Comcast and BitTorrent. According to the article in the Wall Street Journal:

The companies are in talks to collaborate on ways to run BitTorrent’s technology more smoothly on Comcast’s broadband network, and allow Comcast to transport video files more effectively over its own network in the future, said Tony Warner, Comcast’s chief technology officer.

In a nice piece of timing, NCTA pretty much argued for exactly this approach on Thursday of last week, during a media briefing to address the topic of broadband network management. CNET’s Anne Broache provided coverage:

Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, said he’s “amused” that in all the coverage of the Comcast-BitTorrent spat, no one’s talking about the cable industry’s role in getting high-speed Internet service to millions of American households and, by extension, enabling online applications and services to take off.

“One of the ironies is that most of these applications depended on cable’s rollout of residential broadband and our ongoing efforts to optimize the network to deliver the experience our customers expect,” McSlarrow said…

Kyle argued we should encourage experimentation in the issue of network management and then the marketplace and the Internet community can judge which solutions work best. You can hear the whole briefing by downloading this MP3.

Ken Ferree, President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation and former head of the Cable Services Bureau at the FCC, had this reaction to the call:

…Mr. McSlarrow added color and line to a vision of the future that is hazy shades of gray for most of us. As he pointed out, the broadband market is yet in its infancy. It is the offspring of diverse experimentation, and it shall grow only through more, and varied, experimentation. Like Walt Whitman putting the chuff of one hand on our hip and gesturing with the other to the vast unknown landscapes before us, Mr. McSlarrow rightly cautioned against taking our ease with what we know today – today’s technologies, today’s protocols, today’s data sharing applications, today’s networks or services.

For tomorrow will turn upon technologies, networks, applications, and protocols that, in 2008, are nothing more than mysterious phantoms of ideas. And the speed of innovation is, if anything, increasing. We may well, in very short order, and assuming the government doesn’t freeze technology into place with misguided regulations or unnecessary limits on innovative new business models, all interact with technologies in ways that would seem completely foreign now.

And therein lives the magic of ingenious engineering, creative marketing, and courageous entrepreneurship. The vast, unknowable landscape of tomorrow can only be discovered by leaving the market free to explore where it will. “Here are bisquits to eat and here is milk to drink, but as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.”

For more information, you can read Declan McCullagh’s Q&A with Comcast’s Joe Waz about the BitTorrent deal.

This has more to do with cable programming than cable technology or policy, but I thought I’d share it.

The National Geographic channel is running a fascinating show this month called Aftermath: Population Zero.  If you’re interested in the impact human’s have on their natural environment – and what would happen to Earth if we disappeared – you should check it out.

I honestly didn’t know quite what to expect when I saw the preview for it.  The human race disappears one morning, and from there the program explores what would happen in the days, weeks, months, years and eons following.  NGC describes it as “the astounding story of a world we will never see… [a] world without humans.”

Almost immediately, the world begins to lose power as electric generating equipment realizes nobody is at the controls and fails or shuts down.  Within a few weeks, the diesel generators that keep water pumping to cool spent nuclear fuel also fail, resulting in a massive nuclear meltdown at the world’s nuclear facilities.

Zoo animals and family pets suddenly forced to fend for survival roam the streets and begin the process of relearning life in the wild.  Within a few years, nature begins to reclaim our biggest cities.  Within about 150 years, structures like high-rise buildings, the Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower come crashing to the ground.  Within a few hundred years, all evidence of our existence is gone – save for the stainless steel fixtures that will take centuries more to disappear.

Hollywood has made more than a few movies that examine an apocalyptic scenario that leave few, if any, humans wandering the world.  Aftermath goes one step beyond and explores the process through which the Earth would repair itself.

It’s a two hour program, but well worth the time invested.

The country is beginning to hear about the coming Digital Television transition. Unfortunately, there are continuing areas of confusion, even (as pointed out previously) among experts. One of the key points that trip up people is that there are really two transitions. Let’s make one thing clear up front. If you get television from a cable operator (or one of our competitors), you probably lump all those channels together: CNN, Fox, Lifetime, ABC, it’s all the same, right? But some channels are from broadcast stations in your area: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, The CW. Those other channels, such as MTV and ESPN, are cable channels. The high-profile DTV Transition coming in February 2009 — as full power over-the-air broadcast TV stations switch to digital and turn off their analog broadcast signal — is the broadcast industry’s digital transition. And although cable is playing a role in that, the cable industry is going through its own transition. Let me explain the difference.

The broadcasters’ transition is about digital television, where the picture and sound information is expressed in the form of data bits representing, for example, a “1” or a “0”. You can think of this transition as analogous to the transition from vinyl records to CDs.

Cable operators are also transitioning some analog channels onto digital cable tiers in order to reclaim space. With digital cable, compression technology is used to allow more than one program service to be carried in the bandwidth space normally required for one analog program service. Typically, the signal is sent to the home, decompressed in the set-top box and changed into analog signals for display on the television. You can think of this transition as something like the manner in which you can compress large files for easier downloading, and then you decompress them for viewing.

Your local TV stations are offered in hi-def formats on digital cable, but digital TV and digital cable are two different animals.

As we’ve discussed before, part of the DTV Transition will require that you get a digital-to-analog converter box to continue watching full power over-the-air broadcast TV stations on an analog TV set. If all your TV sets are connected to cable, you won’t need to do anything to continue to watch your local broadcast stations.

However, some popular cable channels are only available on cable’s digital tiers. In addition, other popular cable channels may be moving from the analog tier to the digital tier because channel space is limited. In these circumstances, you may want to move up to digital service from your cable company — and a digital cable set-top box. But don’t confuse cable’s digital migration with the broadcasters’ digital TV transition.