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.

A pretty hilarious moment (for me anyway) occurred on today’s edition of the syndicated television program Martha. During the last segment of today’s show, host Martha Stewart had her guest Sheraton Kalouria, the president of broadcasting for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, demonstrate how to use Video on Demand.

(If you’re somehow unfamiliar with VOD, read more here.)

The hook appears to be that Martha Stewart On Demand is now available through Comcast and Cox. In the segment (summarized here), Kalouria took remote in hand and showed Martha how to navigate through the menus and find the content you want, available for free.

The Martha Stewart On-Demand channel features a wonderful selection of things the company is best known for: crafts, weddings, pets, and food. Under each section is a selection of content from our programs, including “The Martha Stewart Show,” “Martha Stewart Living,” “Petkeeping with Marc Morrone,” and “Everyday Food.”

This is part of a growing trend of cable operators beefing up their VOD libraries to give more content to their customers. It was pretty funny to see a big media mogul like Martha scrolling through on-screen menus, but it was probably a great learning experience for her viewers to be exposed to the VOD platform.