Paul Allen’s spotty investing history just got a littler spottier, with a deal to sell set-top-box maker Digeo to cable-equipment provider Arris Group for $20 million.

The Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder is the primary shareholder in Digeo, a closely held Kirkland, Wash., maker of digital video recorders that has struggled with sales of its products and laid off about half of its staff last year. Digeo won’t say how much money it has raised, but a report from 2002 says the company took a $110 million investment at the time. Mr. Allen’s portion of that investment wasn’t disclosed, nor would a spokesman for Mr. Allen comment on how much he had invested in the company, but it seems safe to say he took a bath on his Digeo investment.

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Comcast (CMCS) is now on the iPhone bandwagon. On Thursday, Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S. by subscribers, announced a free application for the Apple (AAPL) device that lets customers check their Comcast email and home voice mail as well as surf their TV schedules.

Still to come: the ability to program DVRs at home from mobile devices, the way that rivals like DirecTV (DTV), Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) do.

But the application has gotten largely positive reviews in the blogosphere. Gizmodo calls it a “surprisingly nice little app,” while MobileCrunch says it’s “a good, solid offering that’s a no-brainer for iPhone owners who subscribe to and use Comcast’s voice, internet, and cable services.”

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Reed Hastings is prowling CES for deals. Already, in the past year, the CEO of DVD rental service Netflix Inc. has cut at least a half-dozen partnerships with consumer electronics makers to make a Netflix service that streams movies and television shows over the Internet watchable on television sets via game consoles, digital video recorders and other gadgets.

This week at CES, Netflix announced Korea’s LG Electronics will let viewers tune into the Netflix service through an upcoming line of HDTVs. A Netflix deal also announced this week with another television maker, Vizio, could be even more interesting because some of those sets will be able to get onto the Internet wirelessly, a technology that will make it much easier to get online than sets with only wired Internet connections.

“I think it will double or triple the percentage of people who have those devices and hook them up to the Internet,” Hastings said, over a cup of gelato at a café in the Venetian hotel.

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TiVo (TIVO) shares are down sharply late this afternoon, apparently on investor disappointment that the judge overseeing the company’s patent-infringement case against Dish Network (DISH) did not issue a ruling today in a dispute over whether DISH had violated an injunction issued earlier this year after the company had been found to be in violation of two TiVo patents.

Dow Jones Newswires reports that the two companies were in court today for a hearing on the issue. The wire service story notes that there was no decision today; ergo, DISH can (at least for now) continue to distribute the DVRs that are at the heart of the patent suit. TiVo has been asserting that the workaround for the patents in question that DISH has developed does not cure the patent infringement.

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