Finally! Comcast adds missing ESPN properties

You may have already seen that the NFL and Comcast today settled their long dispute over the terms for carrying the NFL Network. But it's another Comcast announcement today, a little more under the radar, that is more likely to please sports fans who use Comcast cable and/or Internet services here in the Pioneer Valley: Comcast and ESPN reached an agreement for the cable carrier to add ESPNU to its broadcasting lineup and, even better, ESPN360.com to its Internet broadband service.

For sports fans, the absence of ESPNU has been a major pain for a good nine months of the year. Comcast has had most of the other major sports offerings; some of it is on pay tiers, to be sure, but at least it was available. That includes the likes of the Tennis Channel and Golf Channel; the channels associated with the major sports leagues here in the U.S.; several Fox Regional Sports channels; two of the main soccer-enthusiast channels, Fox Soccer Channel and Gol TV; and others such as CBS College Sports and Versus.

Oh, and everything from a little sports conglomerate called ESPN, including high definition versions of ESPN/ESPN2, plus ESPN Classic, Deportes, and News....but, inexplicably, not ESPNU. For college football fans, this dialed out a lot of potential watching in the fall, and it only got worse in winter, since ESPN is fond of shifting key basketball games onto the U. Closet UConn women basketball fans in the Valley (and that includes me, except that I'm not at all "closet" about it) have had to deal with a game or two each season being unreachable on Comcast -- hard stuff for a fanbase accustomed to seeing every single game on Connecticut Public TV or the networks. (You think I'm kidding? The uproar was so huge down in Connecticut in 2008 that Gov. Jodi Rell actually strong-armed ESPN into making a key Big East women's tournament game available on free TV because it was stuck on the U, a move she wasn't able to repeat this season.) Now, Comcast subscribers will get all of that, plus lots of cool second-tier sports such as soccer, lacrosse and softball during their seasons.

And that's not even the best part of the announcement. Comcast has long been the one major Internet provider that didn't offer ESPN360.com, which makes a wide range of worldwide ESPN game content available to watch on your broadband computer -- both live and archived. Now, all of that treasure trove of sports will be available to Comcast Internet subscribers for no extra charge above what they're paying now. Hey, who needs a life when they can have ESPN360 instead? (My first hoped-for stop? Some of the ESPN Deportes Spanish-language soccer coverage that doesn't make it to the top-tier ESPN networks.)

Don't go looking for this tomorrow; the joint Comcast/ESPN release says it'll be ready "in time for the start of this year's college football season." But given the swath of the Valley that Comcast covers, it's a certainty that a lot of local sports fans are going to be much happier campers in a few months at most. Now, if Comcast could only add Setanta for us soccer junkies, we'd be all set....

Comcastic? Maybe not so much

In my email inbox at the Cube's annex (a/k/a home), I found a notice today from Comcast confirming the controversial change to its user agreement that will limit Comcast broadband users to 250 gigabytes of bandwidth, upload and download combined, starting on October 1. This has been well-covered in the general and tech press over the past month or so, so the email hardly came as a surprise. With Comcast's ubiquity as a broadband provider in the lower Valley portion of GazetteNET's coverage area, I thought I'd take a look at what this means now and for the future -- and be assured, those two time periods will result in very different meanings for this decision.

Let's look first at Comcast's own propaganda from the email about what 250GB translates to in current real-world terms. The company says in its examples that to hit the 250GB cap, you'd have to:

* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email). 5K per email is a joke, of course -- have these people never heard of embedded HTML or attachments? (Note the parsing here of "plain text" email.) But email is never going to put you anywhere near your limits. We can safely blow off this example.

* Download 62,500 songs at 4 MB/song. Of course, at that size, we're talking mp3s or formats like the AAC compression that Apple uses for iTunes downloads. For lossless compression, a favorite of more discriminating music fans, you can be looking at file sizes for a song that are way bigger than that; a good Grateful Dead jam with a song segue can put you into the 100MB-150MB area.

Still, it's hard to grab even enough lossless music to push the cap. Right now, I don't see this as a huge problem for anyone but the most aggressive downloader. I have a monthly Usenet subscription that affords me 25 GB per month in downloads for my music bootleg habit, and only in months when I'm really on the case do I run up against that. Let's say I did that, though, and also hit some of the more popular BitTorrent sites for downloading music at the same rate. I'd still be at one-fifth of my monthly Comcast cap.

* Download 125 standard definition movies at 2 GB/movie. Now, here's where discussion of this cap becomes real. Video tips the scales a lot more. But right at the moment, 250GB is a lot of capacity unless you've figured out a way to tap some serious high-definition video sources. Notice Comcast's parsing yet again: "Standard definition movies." Sure...except that the HD future is all that anyone is talking about as the future for reaching consumers, Comcast included. The streaming model for video is very close to a reality; Netflix may have a great mail delivery service for DVDs at the moment, but that's still an expensive model for them, and that streaming they offer as the add-on now is what they'd like to become the norm for its consumers. Figure on that happening in five years' time, at most.

Suddenly, 250GB going both ways starts to strain the limits pretty quickly. Can you get a few streamed HD movies a month, plus a few fully lossless albums (since the record companies would also love to get rid of the shiny plastic things called CDs and save on their overhead too), plus iTunes downloads, plus your kid's addiction to YouTube, playing World of Warcraft or Halo 3 online, and his shared-group multimedia project for homework? Maybe...and maybe not. For the average single user, even for the aggressive downloader, 250GB may be OK; for the needs of a family of four that's fully tapped into the digital lifestyle, this is not going to be adequate within a couple of quick years. Limits on sizes can change very quickly in the world of computing. I still have a Macintosh IIci sitting in my garage that has an 80MB hard drive -- yes, that's an M. It was when I discovered mp3s in 1996 that it became quickly clear that 80 megs wasn't going to cut it anymore. Since then, my appetite for storage, and that of millions of computer users, has become immense as file sizes have grown for just about everything we use.

In short, I could easily see this becoming an issue much sooner than Comcast would like you to think. I'm also not happy that the company is leaving it entirely up to its subscribers to track their own usage -- something that's not a simple task for anyone, let alone an average family user. And as a longtime technology writer and Comcast watcher, I think the suspicion, already voiced by some analysts, that Comcast would love to sell you video services down the road that wouldn't count against the cap is a well-founded one. (The company has already said that its VoIP phone service isn't included in the cap.) For Comcast to shoot you video that wouldn't be counted, while counting the traffic that a competitor such as Netflix would send, would be a violation of the principle of "Net neutrality" -- the idea that everyone should have equal access to the Internet, which was a resource initially developed by the tax dollars of Americans. Net neutrality has worked well in creating the full-flavored Internet that you know today, and Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the other big carriers would dearly love to do away with it; they've already spent millions lobbying Congress to try, repeatedly (and thus far without success). This could end up being a real inroad in that regard. For now, then, Comcast's cap shouldn't cause you much havoc -- but this bears watching as time passes, and not just for your download limits.