Speaking on Tuesday at the Cable Show in Washington, Roberts shared his thoughts on the future of the TV industry and showed off new Comcast kit intended to provide a faster, more-connected experience. The technology included cloud service X2, which allows subscribers to customize their experience to a greater degree than previous services, showing recently watched shows, favorite apps and other types of personalized content. Roberts also showed off a 3-gigabit/sec connection capable of gulping down a movie near-instantly (see our take here).

Addressing the current cable viewing experience, Roberts acknowledged that cross-screen consumption through Comcast’s TV Everywhere is far from integrated.

“Guilty as charged that we haven’t made it as easy as it needs to be. We need to make a tablet so it automatically knows it’s you and you don’t need to authenticate,” he said, adding that Facebook would be another sign-in option.

Roberts also acknowledged people’s propensity for “binge-viewing,” which has taken off in response to offerings by Netflix and other non-traditional TV providers. In response, he said Comcast would be repeating its “Watchathon” experiment — where customers can binge on hundreds of episodes of popular shows like The Walking Dead — at least every 90 days.

The Roberts talk was part of an industry event so needless to say, there were no questions about cord-cutting, disruptors like Aereo or breaking up the cable bundle.

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In many ways it would seem that the rise of gigabit networks would crush the business of providing pay TV, but in fact, if cable companies play it smart, they may find a way to walk the line as their industry transitions to all-IP content delivery over broadband networks. They may even find new sources of revenue by offering IP services such as home security and automation. To understand what cable firms are dealing with, I spoke with Phil McKinney, the president of CableLabs, the industry standards setting body that is responsible for pushing cable’s access technologies.

CableLabs is the organization behind the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, which has helped cable companies roll out 100 Mbps and faster speeds. Unfortunately, those speeds have a practical limit that won’t help cable providers like Comcast or Time Warner Cable compete with Google’s gigabit networks. And if AT&T or municipalities get aggressive about deploying such networks, cable providers might find themselves selling the equivalent of feature phones in a smartphone world.

Getting cable to a gig

Enter DOCSIS 3.1, the next generation of the cable access technologies. The new standard will allow cable firms deploying D3.1 equipment to deliver up to 10 gigabits per second down and 1 gigabit up. The technology uses OFDM technologies familiar to the wireless industry to cram more bits into a single megahertz of available spectrum used in the cable plants (it’s 11 bits per hertz if you care). Thus, cable providers can then deliver more bandwidth using their existing radio frequencies.

These RF channels are part of cable’s legacy of delivering analog television signals over coaxial cable. In today’s hybrid fiber and coax networks some of the overall transmission is digital, but the coaxial and RF frequency limits remain in some parts of the network.

Cable firms still haven’t gone all-IP, which means that most cable companies are dedicating some of their spectrum to their pay television business and some to delivering broadband. One technology uses IP and the other uses QAMs. But as people demand more bandwidth and higher definition TV channels, cable operators must decide where to allocate their limited spectrum, or lose market share they have gained in the broadband market.

McKinney is also touting new compression codecs like HEVC that help lower the number of bits in a stream but still deliver high-definition quality. It uses half the information that MPEG-4, the current standard, uses. That gives cable companies a little more room on their spectrum to allocate for more broadband channels or more TV channels. McKinney notes that CableLabs is moving faster than it has ever moved in order to get DOCSIS 3.1 out to constituents — achieving in two and half years what it took five to do for previous standards. Comcast says it expects to start deploying DOCSIS 3.1 in 2015.

But what about the business model?

And speed is important, because widespread access to high-speed broadband is threatening the cable industry’s core business — packaging a bunch of channels together and selling it to end consumers, as well as selling some advertising against those channels. On one side there are people cutting the cord — canceling their subscriptions and relying on content from Netflix, Hulu or even just over-the-air broadcasts. On the other side are content companies pushing for higher fees from cable operators, especially for things like live sports, which many analysts believe are the main reason people don’t dump their cable packages altogether.

But the cost of cable is rising, something consumers are fighting as they become more accustomed to picking and choosing their own content on demand. To satisfy those consumers cable companies are offering their own IP-delivered services that bring on-demand content to subscribers’ tablets and phones, even when they are outside their home.

That embrace of technology though, can require tradeoffs for cable providers. For example, Comcast now delivers all of its video on demand content via IP, which means it divides its available spectrum into three chunks. One is for the traditional cable TV that’s broadcast, one is for broadband and one is for delivering the bandwidth for its IP-based Xfinity VoD service. AT&T has done this with its U-Verse services on its copper lines, but Comcast got in trouble for it last year when people questioned if that practice violated network neutrality, since Comcast doesn’t count its Xfinity content as part of its bandwidth cap.

Recouping lost revenue in an all-IP world

With DOCSIS 3.1, Comcast may have more headroom to raise its caps if its network is truly congested at the cable plant, but the business challenge remains. It must also figure out how to keep customers from dumping a $200 monthly charge for both TV and broadband and choosing instead a $50 broadband package. Adding faster speeds and charging more for those speeds might be one way to keep revenue up. And despite cable industry fear-mongering about upgrade costs, McKinney estimates that the upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 gear should cost cable companies less than the upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0, which analysts put at roughly $100 per home.

Chart courtesy of Stifel.

But aside from charging more for better broadband, cable companies shouldn’t have to give up on pay TV. Already companies like Time Warner Cable are experimenting with cheaper programming bundles in additional to concessions like allowing customers to watch any show, anywhere, on any device. The pay TV providers already have relationships with the content companies, and while they may not be the only path to mass market anymore for the Disneys and HBOs of the world, they still are an important channel.

Cable companies have tools they can use to protect content, they still have relationships with more than 80 percent of the U.S. households and they are aggressive about offering content in a way that consumers want. So, if they can transition to more of an a la carte option, using IP to deliver those choices on demand, they could still provide a service that consumers are willing to pay for. And thanks to new standards described above, the bandwidth is there to do this.

So cable providers just need to walk the line between cannibalizing their traditional pay TV business with IP-delivered services, while upgrading their networks to ensure they can still deliver a quality experience while maintaining their revenue and profits. The big telcos walked this line a few years back when they had to transition people from wireline networks to cellular service without hurting their own profits and revenue.

The cable business is a little tougher because they have the content companies in there demanding more money and seeing new avenues for distribution, but as disruptive as this shift is, I think in a few years we might see an even bigger one once pay TV providers realize they can take all of their content and deliver it over the top. Maybe the internet won’t eat the cable company after all.

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Roberts used the 3 Gbps connection which he used to open an email and download a 4K video file. I’m sure the email didn’t tax the connection. However the 4K video download would certainly tax Comcast’s existing broadband cap of 300 GB per month (it is trialing other versions of the cap) given that a single 4K movie download weighs in at about 100 GB per movie. Yet, 4K is the next generation video delivery standard after HD and companies such as Netflix are already starting to deliver content in 4K.

On the broadband side, Comcast knows that to keep up with the demand for faster broadband networks, it will have to push the envelope on gigabit speeds. Google is building out gigabit networks in three cities, while AT&T has threatened to build on in Austin, Texas. Meanwhile private companies and municipalities are pushing their own gigabit projects.

So while Comcast currently delivers a top speed of 305 Mbps in some markets, showing off a multi-gigabit connection is important to show that cable technology can keep up with the fiber to the home build outs. The 3 Gbps connection was delivered over a DOCSIS hybrid fiber coax (HFC) network. But in the real world such speeds might be impossible without an upgrade to the next generation DOCSIS 3.1 technology.

As impressive as this demo is, the reality of deploying 3 gigabits per second may require a new technology (the coming DOCSIS 3.1 standard) as well as some hard thinking on how Comcast wants to use the spectrum available inside its cables.

The DOCSIS standard boosts broadband speeds by allocating more channels comprised of 6MHz of spectrum together to deliver broadband. So more channels, equal more speeds. But, those 6MHz chunks of spectrum also deliver between 2-4 television channels as well, so at a certain point Comcast has to decide if it wants to boost broadband at the expense of adding or delivering television channels.

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Comcast’s new EcoSaver smart thermostat service is powered by Bay Area startup EcoFactor, and that partnership was announced last year. Customers who sign up for the thermostat service get one of the Xfinity connected thermostats — from device makers like Radio Thermostat of America and CentraLite — and the EcoFactor software learns the home’s heating and cooling patterns and incrementally shaves off energy consumption.

The idea is that customers can reduce their energy consumption and energy bill due to heating and cooling in tiny and automated amounts, and without sacrificing comfort in the home. The homeowner can also override the system at any time. It’s like how the Nest learning thermostat works, but without the Nest thermostat.

For startup EcoFactor, the product launch is a big deal. The company, which itself launched in 2009, now has its software available to 23 million customers just through this partnership.

For Comcast’s connected lighting service, the cable company is working with lighting company Osram Sylvania to launch LED light bulbs that can be controlled remotely. Comcast says that the light bulbs could save customers 83 percent on their energy bill and could last 17.5 times longer than the traditional incandescent bulbs.

LEDs from Cree (not the ones being used by Xfinity Home)

Comcast’s Xfinity Home products are using the cable company’s broadband network reach, and home WiFi to connect home devices — like these new light bulbs and thermostats — to the cloud. Customers will probably buy the services because they want the home automation aspect (in addition to connected video security services, and door and window lock monitoring services) and as a byproduct they’ll be reducing their energy consumption, too.

Cable and telecom companies have been moving into offering home energy management, connected thermostats and connected lighting to their products over the past couple of years. AT&T launched their digital home product, which includes the option for a thermostat, earlier this year. See this article back in 2011 to see how long telcos and cable cos have been working on adding a layer of energy management.

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According to their research, cable companies have about 47.5 million broadband subscribers, while the remainder are with the phone companies. Cable companies added about 800,000 new subscribers, about 72 percent of the total for the month. The top two phone companies — AT&T and Verizon — saw a decline of 696,000 DSL accounts but added a total of 919,000 fiber subscribers. FIber-based broadband now accounts for about 40 percent of AT&T and Verizon’s total broadband customer base.

Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, pointed out that typically the first quarter is better than the second and third quarters of the year, and “2013 began with another strong first quarter.” Net broadband additions in Q1 2013 were about 500,000 more than in Q4 2012, and that bodes well for rest of the year.

A resurgent housing market and stronger economy along with our growing need for speed and connectivity are the reasons why demand for U.S. broadband is booming. Here are some numbers to give you an idea as to who is winning and who is losing.

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Following the news that Yahoo will acquire social sharing platform Tumblr for a massive $1.1 billion in cash, it’s becoming clear that two of these investing svengalis are Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. They’re the venture capital rockstars of the social web as their jaw-dropping track records shows — they have been very early investors in companies like Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare. Wilson was also early to Zynga, Etsy and Kickstarter.

David Karp, Founder and CEO, Tumblr paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

We’ve seen this pattern before. During the networking boom of the late 1990s, it was Vinod Khosla and Promod Haque of Norwest Venture Partners who scored many of the top deals. Khosla was early to the table with companies like Cerent, Siara and Juniper Networks.

For the first wave of the consumer Internet it was John Doerr who owned it all, and later during the search boom, he and Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz led the charge by investing in Google. Similarly, the shift to the social web (or post Web 2.0) has been a happy hunting ground for Wilson and Sabet.

While there are others such as David Sze of Greylock and Jim Breyer of Accel Partners who have found success in social with Facebook, the Sabet and Wilson team has a better on-base percentage. And one of the reasons why these two guys have found gold faster than others is because they are active participants in the social web and invest in what they know.

Sabet, who moved up to number 51 on Forbes’ Midas List in 2013, was described by Tumblr’s founder and CEO David Karp as someone who “lives and breathes,” social media, and as Karp’s “mentor, friend and partner from day zero.” Sabet said in a post this morning that he met Karp when he was 19 and “was immediately taken with his passion and drive to create wonderful things.” His other investments include Twitter, Foursquare, OMGPOP (sold to Zynga for $180 million), and thePlatform (acquired by Comcast), as well as RunKeeper, Boxee, Jelly, Lyft and Stack Exchange.

Wilson, who writes the popular blog AVC, is one of the most winning venture investors thus far in the new century. He rose to number 16 on Forbes’ Midas List in 2013. In addition to Tumblr, Wilson has backed Twitter, Zynga, Etsy, Kickstarter, FeedBurner, Lending Club, Zemanta, ComScore and Tacoda (sold to AOL in 2007).

In a sign of the new power of the New York startup ecosystem, Tumblr is run out of New York, and both Wilson and Sabet are East Coasters — Wilson in New York, Sabet in Boston — but of course spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley. It’s through these two investors, who live across the country from Sand Hill Road, that a major chunk of the web’s leading social brands have emerged.

Pulling out lessons from these master’s investing practices, would be a good topic for a book. But I’ll run through just a couple I see that are obvious. Sabet clearly has an eye for finding the passionate creator founder early, and has an ability to see the future. Wilson has long practiced what he has preached, is utterly immersed in social and has a unique way with words. He writes this morning on his blog about one of the cliches of VC investing: “success has a thousand fathers.”

Clearly Sabet and Wilson are two of the main fathers of this morning’s success story.

Updated at 1:20 PM on May 20, with comment from Fred Wilson. Wilson attributed some of the deals to his Union Square venture partners and says that “investment syndicates are a team.”

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It’s also AT&T’s first foray into an over the top service. The company will offer the service in all areas where it provides wireless service, which may not seem like a big deal, except that the system will connect to both the AT&T wireless network as well as the wireline broadband inside a home. Looks like Ma Bell is ready to make some money on other people’s pipes.

What’s inside Digital Life

As for the service, it’s pretty compelling for the average person who’s evaluating a home automation or security system, especially if AT&t does open up the platform later as it promises it will. There are two basic packages. The cheaper entry-level package costs $29.99 a month plus $149.99 for equipment and installation. It includes 24/7 home monitoring, a wireless keypad, a remote, some sensors and an indoor siren. The more expensive package includes all of that plus three more sensors of the owner’s choice for $39.99 a month and $249.99 for the gear and installation.

AT&T also has a slew of add-on devices including water leakage sensors, wireless cameras and thermostats that a consumer can buy and add to the plan for a monthly fee. AT&T has staffed two call centers around the clock in the U.S. and has provided a battery with the system to ensure that the product is reliable and online all the time. The wireline broadband and AT&T wireless provide redundancy for the connectivity.

Glen Lurie, the president of emerging enterprises and partnerships at AT&T, explained that the whole plan behind the system is for it to be secure and easy for customers to use. That’s why for example, you can’t just bring any old connected device onto the Digital Life network. Much like AT&T’s wireless network, the AT&T wants to test the devices before it will allow them on your home network. Lurie declined to tell me when AT&T would bring on additional partners. He also declined to tell me what companies AT&T is partnering with at launch.

And yet …

However, AT&T’s plan is pretty darn basic at the entry-level and adding standard components for really useful automation and security can bring the total installation and gear cost to about $600 and the monthly service fees to about $55 a month if you add the security camera ($200 installed) and energy management ($150 installed) packages. Remote door locks, water shut-off valves and other tweaks are extra.

That’s not crazy considering you get an integrated app that’s actually quite nice to use for controlling everything, but it’s still a significant investment: especially given the closed nature of the ecosystem.

I’m currently contemplating a $210 set of connected door locks (the non-connected locks are about $85) and so I know that adding connected gadgets to your home isn’t cheap. Because for some of these devices, like thermostats or door locks are also installed into the home, you had better hope you like the overall service. Of course, that’s great for AT&T, because it presumably reduces churn. My colleague Kevin Tofel and I had a good discussion of how to choose a home automation system this week on the internet of things podcast.

And once I have those locks I’ll have to wait for a system such as MobiPlug or SmartThings to support those locks if I want to integrate them into my existing home network. Or maybe I’d have to hope my locks are supported by a software vendor such as Zonoff. Plus, I’d have to do the equivalent of programming scenes that AT&T already has its app. The Leave Home scene will turn down your air, turn off the lights and lock your doors, for example.

Lurie claimed that AT&T is ahead of its competitors by about two to three years, noting that many of the home security products from companies such as Comcast or Time Warner Cable are provided by outside vendors and don’t have an integrated ecosystem like what AT&T is offering.

I think the integration is wonderful, but I do think it will be more powerful when I can bring in some of my existing connected devices onto the AT&T Digital Life network. While the hub that comes with the service supports Wi-Fi, 915 Mhz and other radios, the devices connect in a proprietary mesh that AT&T uses because it ensures security. It also ensures I can’t bring my own devices into the Digital Life family just yet.

But for those without my own particular hangups, the product is certainly worth a look. It launches in 15 markets on Friday including Atlanta, Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colo.; Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Riverside, Calif.; San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and select areas of the New York and New Jersey areas.It will be in 50 markets by the end of 2013, available for purchase online and for testing at AT&T wireless stores.

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If you’ve taken part in CSA (community-assisted agriculture) program you know you get a bin of in-season fruits and veggies every other week or so — hopefully from a local farm. In that bin will be a few tomatoes, radishes, whatever and a ton of kale, which grows easily and big and is forgiving of bad weather. It’s prolific and it’s cheap. Then you find dishes and recipes to use that kale.

And this is where the fun begins: Kale, it turns out, can be used in everything. In chicken soup, in salads. It can be coated with sesame oil and roasted to make kale chips (my favorite). It can be sliced and diced in myriad ways. It can be boiled, fried (or sauteed, if you’re a fancypants) and baked. And it’s good for you.

Proponents would like to say the same about OpenStack.

OpenStack — in cable, in marketing, on a stick

Look at the various packages and delivery modes coming online: Red Hat this week announced the rollout of its RDO OpenStack distribution, “a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives.” Piston Cloud (see disclosure) offers what InformationWeek called OpenStack on a stick, the software packed on a memory stick for easy deployment. Nebula just brought out its OpenStack-in-a-box controller for linking legacy applications into the OpenStack arena. HP cloud guru Saar Gillai talked up his company’s “hardened” OpenStack for enterprise use. Cloudscaling offers an OpenStack cloud that will burst into Amazon or Google public clouds as needed.

More to the point is that end-user organizations — not just the usual tech vendor suspects —  showed off some ways they actually use OpenStack. These included a new Comcast online interactive cable TV guide that helps users quickly navigate their hundreds of channels to find the sporting event they want to see and bring it up on screen for a quick score check. There’s also Hubspot’s use of OpenStack to build a hybrid cloud that powers and helps target its inbound marketing campaigns. Whether or not you want to get targeted in-bound marketing, these are real use cases for the technologies that will impact actual users.

Key to OpenStack success? Making it disappear

As Florian Otel, head of HP Cloud Services in EMEA, told a session on enterprise use of OpenStack, that many of the technical gaps in the software have been filled over the past year and folks now have to focus on real customer value.

“Remember how many years we heard this would be the year of Linux on the desktop? That never happened. Android is what it took to make Linux attractive to desktop users,” he said. By bundling the underlying technology with hardware and a problem to solve and an application to solve it, Linux in another guise is hugely popular, he said. For those who would quibble with his Linux analogy, he added: “Linux has as much to do with Android as iOS has to do with BSD.

The same will be true for OpenStack he noted. As it becomes a platform or an enabler for higher-level services, it will take off.

Now, to get back to kale: The metaphor unravels a bit because most folks use kale as an adjunct to other foods (although not always) while the goal is for OpenStack to be the basis for a whole realm of services — for enterprise users, for mobile users, for fill-in-the-blank constituencies.

The big question this time next year will be how much of OpenStack is being consumed by the masses — whether they know it or not.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user by Nick Saltmarsh

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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1: Customer-to-vendor ratio is getting better.

Mark Muehl, Comcast SVP of product engineering at OpenStack Summit.

But just a bit. Tuesday’s keynotes featured real, live OpenStack users Bloomberg, Comcast, HubSpot and Best Buy. Not bad.

Bloomberg’s Pravir Chandra said his team set some high goals for what they were trying to  build — they needed high availability, no cascading failures and smooth scale down and scale up. They were able to get there by deploying OpenStack along with considerable custom work of their own, both above and below that layer. They ended up setting up the high-availability databases and figuring out how to aggregate logs from the hypervisor level, said Chandra who heads the security architecture team in Bloomberg’s CTO office

Comcast SVP Mark Muehl said the cable giant is using OpenStack to provide real-time programming guides and fast program search. One application quickly locates the NCAA tournament basketball game you want — no easy task — and brings it up for a fast score check. “We are integrating real-time sports feeds. That app would have been impossible to do on our own [older] platform,” Muehl said.

2: Ceph is hot, hot, hot

Based on an informal poll of speakers and attendees, Ceph storage is where it’s at. The Swift storage system?  Not so hot. Best Buy moved from Gluster to Ceph because of the latter’s self-healing capabilities. Ceph offers object and block storage all in one integrated product while Swift handles object storage only. Mirantis EVP Boris Renski said Swift, which comes out of Rackspace, has lots of production installs, but Ceph is viewed as having a more “elegant” architecture. “Unlike Swift, you can use Ceph as the backend for both object and block.” Also, because of a better algorithm for handling data replication, it can promise better scaling, he said, although Mirantis has not fully tested that out yet.

3: Grizzly brings more maturity and features

Grizzly, the seventh release of OpenStack in three years, brings more features and functions to the table. HubSpot will use Grizzly (with some of its own tweaks) to run images on “full bare metal,” said CIO Jim O’Neill. “That means the same image can run on your cloud of choice … . The application doesn’t need to know or care where it runs anymore.”

And that cloud agnosticism brings huge payback. “We took this single image, picked it up from public cloud into a Rackspace-powered private cloud and saw a 4X increased efficiency running that workload,” he said.

4: Choice is good

The same meme of large companies opting to deploy their workloads on multiple clouds vs. one cloud continued at the show. And yes — I can sense the eye rolls coming — there remains an uneasiness over cloud lock-in. The Best Buy guys put a local traffic manager in front of multiple (unnamed) clouds specifically because “we don’t want to lock into any one vendor,” said Steve Eastham, director of web architecture for the Minneapolis-based retailer.

And even the speakers at this OpenStack event said they will remain flexible in their technology choices going forward if OpenStack doesn’t meet their needs. Asked why Samsung opted to go with OpenStack over CloudStack two years ago, Kirk Kim, cloud CTO for Samsung SDS, said they thought OpenStack would scale better.  ”But,” he added, “given the situation today, we might look at that again.” Hmmm. He could not be reached for follow-up.

5: The subtext: AWS and VMware 

The OpenStack faithful are obviously proud of what they’ve accomplished over the past three to four years. It’s not nothing that all that hundreds have contributed to this project and that some customers — outside the OpenStack community itself — are starting to put this stuff into production.

What was left  unsaid, for the most part,  is that OpenStack continues to be measured against Amazon Web Services in the public cloud infrastructure sector and VMware in the (mostly) private cloud market, where legacy applications are in play. This despite the fact that VMware is now an OpenStack Foundation member.

OpenStack may be growing, but it does not have the field to itself.

Feature photo courtesy of hockleyphoto.com.

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Consumers who already use a Comcast-provided set-top box on all of their TV sets don’t have to worry, their service will continue to work as before. But if you have a TV in your den that’s hooked up to your cable outlet without a set-top box, then you’re going to have to get an adapter to keep it working.

Comcast is contacting consumers ahead of the transition, offering them up to two digital TV adapters for free for two years. These adapters are small boxes that come with their own remote control and are connected to a TV set with a coaxial (antenna) cable. Remember the converter boxes that consumers had to buy to receive over-the-air digital TV on old TV sets? It kind of works like that, except the sole purpose of this device is to descramble Comcast’s cable signals.

Comcast confirmed the move towards encrypted basic cable when contacted by GigaOM, and a spokesperson sent us the following statement via email:

“We are beginning to proactively notify customers in select markets that we will begin to encrypt limited basic channels as now permitted by last year’s FCC B1 Encryption Order. While the vast majority of our customers won’t be impacted because they already have digital equipment connected to their TVs, we understand this will be a change for a small number of customers and will be making it as convenient as possible for them to get the digital equipment they may need to continue watching limited basic channels.”

The company is also making a help page available online that goes into some of the details of the offering.

Cable companies have long lobbied for the right to encrypt basic cable channels, arguing that this will prevent cable theft and simplify remote management of their equipment. They succeeded last year when the FCC ruled that they could start to encrypt basic cable, as long as they provide consumers with some help during the transition.

The company also struck a separate agreement with Boxee to provide owners of the Boxee Cloud DVR with access to its encrypted basic feeds — and the new Boxee device also happens to be the first one that’s compatible with a new DLNA-based adapter that streams TV signals via an Ethernet connection.

However, Comcast’s adapters won’t work with Boxee’s old live TV dongle, which the company introduced a little over a year ago to bring live TV to the original Boxee Box. Also left in the dark are customers who use any other kind of digital TV adapter for their PC that are based on coaxial inputs, like the Elgato EyeTV. The last resort for many of these consumers may just be to invest in an antenna.

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