People who illegally download movies and music may soon face more than just empty threats from their Internet service providers.

Some of the largest ISPs in the United States are close to agreements with the entertainment industry to crack down on piracy with stiffer punishments, according to CNet. Repeat offenders could face throttled bandwidth speeds or limited access to the Internet, or they may have to attend programs to learn about the subtleties of copyright law.

CNet’s unnamed sources say the agreement between ISPs and media companies isn’t a done deal yet. But their partnership, which was encouraged in part by the White House, could be announced as early as next month. AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are all reportedly involved.

The entertainment industry has wanted this approach to piracy for years. In 2008, the Recording Industry Association of America said it would stop suing individual file sharers and instead pursue a “graduated response,” in which Internet service providers would penalize offenders.

But the ISPs were reluctant to play ball. Some providers would send threatening letters to subscribers, but rarely would they take action. As DSL Reports notes, Cox Communications was the only major ISP that freely admitted to kicking repeat offenders off its network, and only in extreme situations after many warnings.

The rumored agreement between entertainment companies and ISPs would change all that, although it’s not quite the “three strikes” rule that we’ve seen in other countries such as France and Ireland. In the United States, ISPs will likely stop short of terminating users’ Internet connections completely.

If you’re a law-abiding citizen, there may some downsides. ISPs will reportedly share the cost of operating the program, and I’m guessing those costs will be passed on to subscribers. And as with any anti-piracy effort that relies on detecting IP addresses, there’s a risk of accusing innocent people who keep their Wi-Fi networks open, either intentionally or inadvertently.

But if the agreement goes through, the entertainment industry will celebrate it as another blow to piracy in the United States, following the shutdown of popular file-sharing service LimeWire. Some individual rights holders have also found success strong-arming file sharers with bulk lawsuits. It’s a tough time to be a pirate, even if the craftiest of file sharers will always find a way.

(This post republished from Techland. Image from Flickr user Svadilfari.)

Comcast will bring Skype to customers on a trial basis in the coming months, All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka reports. The service will require an adaptor box, a high-quality video camera and special remote control that allows text input. It’s not clear how much the service will cost, if anything, and whether it’ll be available to cable customers, Internet subscribers or both. As Kafka notes, it’s certainly possible that Comcast could give the service away to platinum cable subscribers as a “please don’t cut the cord” incentive.

Whatever the service looks like when it goes live, it won’t be the first example of Skype on televisions. Skype is already available on several connected TVs from Panasonic and Samsung, and is coming to TVs from Vizio and Sony. Blu-ray players from Sony and Panasonic may also support Skype in the future, and Microsoft plans to build the service into the Xbox 360 once the company’s acquisition of Skype goes through. So although Skype doesn’t have the ubiquity of, say, Netflix, Comcast is playing a bit of catch-up.

Anyway, the fact that Comcast will dabble in web-based services is kind of a big deal. The company obviously sees potential in big-screen video chat, and wants to get on board before customers stray to connected TVs and set-top boxes, which are steadily becoming more viable options for cord-cutters. If subscribers can get everything they need from the cable company, they’ll have less of a reason to experiment with alternatives.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into this. We’ll know for sure if Comcast starts integrating Facebook and Twitter into its cable boxes. Oh wait.

Not so fast there. Comcast’s network management policies do not allow for blocking, and the company blocks based on excessive bandwidth consumption rather than a particular protocol. I know a lot of you out there won’t believe that, but its the reasoning they’re giving.

In other words, Comcast did not block The Pirate Bay. Period.

Comcast’s speed in denying involvement seems to indicate the company was pretty serious in washing its hands of it. It correctly pointed out that the site was also inaccessible in non-Comcast areas, including some in Canada on Rogers’ cable Internet service.

What caused the issue? We’re not sure, although an update on TorrentFreak’s coverage seemed to indicate that it was due to a dead Web server. A check of the traceroute — the path Internet traffic takes from you to a webserver and back — seems to validate that.

It gets all the way to the address of the server, but no further. That would seem to validate some problem on The Pirate Bay’s end — not Comcast’s. The problems seem to persist here in Lancaster, Pa. at least for me: it’s not connecting.

I’m especially interested in hearing from our overseas users and those here in the states not on Comcast. Are you still experiencing problems? Let us know in the comments.

It’s not cheap, though. It set you back $450 initially — that’s a $250 installation fee and then $200 per month for the service itself when it was first introduced last year. But for those speed hungry, Comcast is now offering it for $105 per month for a full year if ordered as part of their Triple Play offering.

You have to have a frame of reference to understand how fast this is: a high definition movie that would have taken an hour and a half on a standard cable connection now takes five minutes: an album from your favorite band that would have taken almost a minute before now takes only three seconds.

Don’t go all nuts though, as there still is a bandwidth cap. Comcast says connections would be throttled after 250GB of bandwidth, which while unfortunate begins to make sense at speeds like this. If everybody’s downloading high-definition movies at the same time, you’d have to think it would slow everybody down!

Comcast launched the Xfinity TV app to much fanfare this week, and though we knew it was coming, we didn’t know all the nitty gritty details until we got our own hands on. After a test run on the iPad, here’s my take on the good, the bad, and the future of the Xfinity app.

The Good
Set-up is quick and painless, and the TV guide experience on the iPad is awesome. Remember how easy it used to be to read the print version of the TV guide out of the newspaper? It’s like that, but better. Scrolling on a large touch screen is fast and effortless, not only through all the different channels, but also across hours and days. You can also filter channels so you’re only looking at a certain category of content (like sports or movies), or so you only see HD shows available. The search function still separates linear programming from on-demand content, but results are in tabs right next to each other, making it easy to toggle between views. I had no trouble setting up a recording from the iPad app, and while there was a delay when switching channels from the touch screen, it was still cool to be able to browse and then change stations without picking up my regular remote.

The Bad
As Jeff Baumgartner points out, you can’t start an on-demand program using only the iPad app. The app will take you to the screen on your TV that shows the program listing, but you still have to hit select on your standard Comcast remote. I also found that you can’t tune to a channel if your TV is in On Demand mode or if you have a DVR menu up. Speaking of DVR, the remote DVR function that lets you manage recordings isn’t integrated in the new Xfinity app. On the iPad, the app exports you to the Safari browser to access the myDVR Manager. Finally, the application crashed on me a couple of times as I tried to dig deeper into program descriptions. Restarting required surfing through menu screens again to return to the right page.

The Future
Comcast has been very clear that not only is it bringing the Xfinity TV app to the Android and Blackberry platforms next, but it’s also adding on-demand TV viewing to the experience soon. This is what Verizon is doing now with the Flex View app, though we don’t know how Comcast’s on-demand library for mobile devices will compare to its telco rival’s. Ultimately I’m hoping we’ll also see linear broadcasting, which Verizon has promised for the future, and access to DVR programming through some kind of syncing mechanism.

Aside from video availability, there is a big future for the Xfinity app in how much metadata it provides for different programs, and how it uses the web to link information across multiple databases. For example, I found out from the app about Summer Glau’s guest appearance on Chuck this week. A natural extension to the application would be to see it link to more information on Summer, including other current projects and potentially where I can watch other programming she’s in in the Comcast line-up. The web is an infinite source of information, and suddenly it’s all available in the wonderful world of IP.

Note: The screenshot above is from iTunes. The rest of the photos here are my own.

I’ve been writing about the idea of dumping cable for a long time and am instinctively drawn to it…but I haven’t done it. In our household, we’re heavy watchers of Netflix on Demand via a Roku box. We also watch Hulu and occasionally partake of movies and TV on iTunes and Amazon on Demand. But we still consume plenty for Comcast Xfinity cable TV. (For that matter, we also buy DVDs, and I’ve been known to pull out VHS tapes.)

Here’s what Internet TV still lacks, and why I still give Comcast quite a bit of money each month even though I watch maybe .00005% of the programming I’m paying for and happily survive without watching American Idol and True Blood:

A unified experience. Actually, Comcast’s remote control makes me violently angry every time I try to use it, so the unified experience in question is my TiVo HD. It’s nice to go to one place to get access to all the TV shows and movies I pay Comcast for. By contrast, watching stuff online still requires figuring out what’s available where and using different interfaces depending on what I’m watching and whom I’m getting it from.

One piece of hardware for everything. In my case it’s a TiVo with a CableCard; in yours it might be the set-top box you get from your cable company, DirecTV, or Dish Network. All of them provide access to all the live content provided by your cable or satellite provider. (I say “live” because TiVo, annoyingly, is incompatible with cable companies’ on-demand services.) But even a cool Internet TV box such as Roku gives you much of the TV and movies you might want but not all of them–most notably, Roku lacks access to all the current TV shows that are available primarily through Hulu. (The only “Internet TV boxes” that offer comprehensive access to content are PCs and Macs.)

Continuousness. I’m not sure if that’s a word, but I know it’s real: If you turn on cable and leave it on a channel and just keep watching, you’ll always get something without having to make additional decisions. And if the channel you’re watching is a specialty venue such as the Food Network, there’s a good chance that the something you get will be something you want to watch. Web-based TV still doesn’t lend itself so well to couch-potato lethargy–when one program ends, you generally need to take action to start watching something new.

News. When great big events happen–be they predictable ones like elections or unexpected ones such as the deaths of celebrities–I like to be able to gorge on coverage and flip between the major networks and all-news networks. You can’t do that on the Web.

Most of cable’s advantages over the Internet feel temporary–and, in the case of shows that aren’t available online, somewhat artificial. I suspect that one of three things will happen in the next eighteen months or so:

• I’ll cut the cable cord.
• Comcast will provide Internet-based access to content that’s appealing enough that I stick with cable. (Its current Xfinity TV Web service has potential, but it’s too clunky and doesn’t have enough stuff I can’t get elsewhere.)
• I’ll jump ship to a cable alternative such as AT&T’s U-Verse, Verizon’s FiOS, or DirecTV because it does a better job with apps and services for PCs, smartphones, and the iPad than Comcast does.

I make no predictions about which of these scenarios will pan out, and I don’t guarantee that I won’t write another post in early 2012 explaining why I’m still paying Comcast for a service I’d love to do without. In the meantime, I’d love to hear how you’re doing your TV watching these days…