If you follow the discussions on this blog, you would be well-advised to watch this excerpt of Kara Swisher’s interview with Comcast COO Steve Burke at the D8 Conference.

(You can also read coverage on the conference blog and at Barron’s Tech Trader Daily blog.)

Burke makes a good case for cable’s resilience in the face of the supposed looming threat of online video (See my post from last week). I particular enjoy the bit, during an exchange about “à la carte” offerings of service, when Burke gently chides Swisher for comparing the monthly price for Comcast’s video service to the daily price for the Wall Street Journal.

Less than a month ago, I wrote about Comcast’s deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 in New England and areas of Philadelphia and New Jersey, following up on the Minneapolis/St. Paul market. I mentioned that they expected to reach more than 10 major markets in the coming months.

Here we go: Comcast launches DOCSIS 3.0 in Oregon and Southwest Washington, including such communities as Aberdeen, Spokane, Beaverton, and Eugene. The Extreme 50 tier offers download speeds of up to 50 Mbps. Comcast will also double speeds for the majority of existing high-speed Internet customers at no additional cost.

The company has a web page which allows you to check if wideband is available in your area or to sign up for e-mail updates when it is rolled out to you.

UPDATE: Media coverage.

• Comcast Rolls Wideband in the Pacific Northwest
• Comcast’s 50 Mbps service comes to OR, WA next month

Here we go again, with another trip down Memory Lane…

In January, I wrote about Brian Roberts’ CES keynote, in which he talked about wideband.  In the spring, Comcast deployed DOCSIS 3.0 in the Minneapolis/St. Paul market. This week, Comcast deployed wideband service to residential homes and businesses in parts of New England, including the Boston Metropolitan region and Southern New Hampshire, as well as areas of Philadelphia and New Jersey. In addition to the new speed tiers, Comcast also is increasing speeds for most of its existing customers.

I walk though all this because many of the technology deployments we discuss on this blog are all part of a larger pattern. DOCSIS 3.0 uses channel bonding to join 6 MHz channels together to provide greater bandwidth. In order to free up channels to provide such services, cable operators have to manage their networks.That’s why you see analog channels moved to the digital tier, as I discussed again recently.

Comcast expects to reach more than 10 major markets and pass nearly 10 million homes and businesses in the next several months.

• Comcast Goes Wide With Wideband
• Comcast To Widen ‘Wideband’ To 10 Million Homes
• Comcast boosts speeds, holds prices: Twin Cities customers are the first in the nation to get the boost in high-speed Internet.
• Comcast Is Launching Its Wideband Modem Service
• Comcast broadens reach of DOCSIS 3.0, 50Mbps connections
• Comcast Takes ‘Wideband’ Wider
• Promoting tru2way TVs

Exciting news: Comcast and Panasonic announced today the first retail deployment of tru2way. Specifically, the two companies announced the arrival of the first tru2way VIERA HDTVs at retail outlets in Chicago and Denver and officially declared the tru2way platform active in those two markets.

What this means is that you can buy a tru2way TV set (initially offered in 42-inch class and 50-inch class sizes), get it set up on your Comcast service, and receive  two-way services without a set-top box.

Tru2way technology is being used to create a common software platform that will enable cable companies, consumer electronics companies, content developers, network programmers and others to extend interactivity to the TV set and other kinds of devices. The new Panasonic VIERA HDTVs are built with tru2way technology inside enabling consumers to access two-way digital cable programming, like video on demand, without a cable operator-supplied set-top box. Panasonic and Comcast have worked together to lead the development and deployment of tru2way technology and related products which are based upon specifications developed by CableLabs®, the industry’s research and development arm.

Comcast customers in the Chicago and Denver areas will be the first in the U.S. to have access to tru2way digital cable service with additional cities expected to go live in the coming months. The tru2way VIERA HDTVs will be available in the Chicago area at Abt Electronics in Glenview and at Circuit City locations and at Ultimate Electronics and Circuit City stores in the Denver area.

Let’s step back in time to January. I wrote about the launch of the tru2way brand and Panasonic & Comcast’s announcement of tru2way products. In May, I posted a video introduction to tru2way, shot at the CableNET exhibit during The Cable Show. in June, I posted about CableCARDs and tru2way and how those two technologies differ and overlap.

As a bit of a political junkie, I’m very excited to see the presidential debate tonight. I’ll be watching it on cable, as I watched the conventions on cable previously (Note my earlier post on the cable’s convention coverage).  You’ve got your choice of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, C-SPAN, Fox Business, and BBC America.

But suppose you can’t see it tonight. Or maybe you want to watch it over again tomorrow. Well, good news for Comcast cable subscribers. The three presidential debates, and the vice presidential debate, will be available On Demand, the day after their original broadcast. C-SPAN, Comcast Media Center and TVN Entertainment are teaming up to make the debates available to viewers. [I stand corrected. Other cable operators are also carrying the debates on Video on Demand as well. Check your local system.]

Comcast has already made On Demand programming available from the Democratic and Republican conventions, major speeches from the candidates and Spanish language content.

You may recall an earlier post on C-SPAN’s Convention Hub, which provided online coverage of the two conventions. Now they’ve launched Debate Hub, a one-stop shop for embeddable video of the debates, coverage from the blogosphere and a variety of other tools for broadband subscribers.

Features include:

• Embeddable video of all debates in their entirety from the C-SPAN Video Library. Users can edit, share and post this video on their own websites.
• Interactive timelines that allow users to watch the debate or read the transcript question-by-question and candidate-by-candidate.
• Word trees that give visual representations of the language used by each candidate throughout the debates.
• Aggregated blog and Twitter coverage of the debates, enabling users to follow the latest online debate news and analysis.
• Debate Cam, providing live streaming video from multiple locations including the debate hall, media filing center, protest area and on-campus debate watch parties.

And while it has nothing to do with cable, I have to give a shout-out to Twitter’s new Election 2008 portal, which allows you see tweets flowing by in real time.