Comcast to begin streaming TV content online

Why do cable companies hate peer-to-peer technology? Because they pay a ton for the bandwidth that makes it possible but get none of the credit.

Say a Comcast Internet user decides to download an episode of Mad Men online. Comcast misses out on the fee it would earn if the customer had subscribed to cable TV service, the network gets mad at Comcast because it doesn't get its fair share of advertising, and Comcast faces hefty expenses because that download is often shared multiple times with other users -- perhaps generating 10 times the traffic than the actual size of the download file of the show. Where's the love?

One solution to this has been to fight it tooth and nail with lawsuits, shutting off service, imposing bandwidth caps. But Comcast now seems ready to simply give up, in a way. Its plan: Stream pay-TV series like the aforementioned online, and don't charge the customer extra... well, as long as he's a TV subscriber.

It's the same notion as on-demand TV, just delivered over the web. The advantage for the consumer: He can watch his shows anywhere, on any device, instead of being tied to his TV. And since Comcast provides the show directly over its own connection, it doesn't pay any more than it normally would to deliver the show to the customer.

And yet cable companies and content providers have been resistant to such arrangements, mainly due to fears that shows, once released online in any format, will end up as a one-stop-shopping source of files for pirates to re-distribute. Comcast thinks it has a solution, namely one that uses its own network to ensure that the watcher of the content is indeed a subscriber. In a recent speech, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts called the idea "video on demand on steroids."

While other cable companies are looking to follow Comcast's lead, the one thing absent in this plan is a method by which customers could subscribe to TV services online only, without having to pay for traditional cable television. Comcast thinks that would cannibalize its revenues, and it's probably right. Until someone comes up with a better method for getting content creators paid for new TV content while removing the TV from the equation, this may be the best idea so far.

What would Don Draper say?