General Electric Co. (GE) and Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) have settled on how to value NBC Universal now and in the future, clearing a key obstacle to giving Comcast control of GE’s television and movie company, according to people familiar with the matter.

After weeks of wrestling, both sides have agreed to value NBC Universal in the neighborhood of $30 billion, people close to the talks said. The agreement includes a mechanism that could reduce the cash Comcast would have to kick in when the deal closes, two of those people said.

The two companies are now ironing out the final details of an agreement, according to the people. An announcement could come as early as the end of this week, the people said.

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Collins Stewart analyst Thomas Eagan thinks you may be swapping your Comcast (CMCSA) shares for Time Warner Cable (TWC) sometime soon.

In a note to clients this morning, Eagan writes that investors may rotate out of Comcast if the company decides to invest $12 billion to $14 billion for a stake in GE’s (GE) NBC-Universal, as rumored. The latest buzz on that deal is that it has a 50/50 chance of happening, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning.

If Comcast were to take a 51 percent stake in NBC-U, Comcast’s revenue from content would jump from 4.5% of the firm’s total sales to 30 percent, writes Eagan.

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Business leaders clearly think the world is back to normal: A media company is weighing a deal of dubious logic. News that Comcast (CMCSA) is in talks to buy control of NBC Universal can only confirm cable investors’ worst fears about Comcast’s fixation on expanding in content. And while Comcast may succeed in getting control without paying a fortune, it isn’t clear what strategic value there is in linking its cable operations with NBC Universal. The deal said to be under discussion involves the cable company merging its array of lesser known cable channels with NBC Universal into a new company that would be roughly half owned by Comcast and half by NBCU’s parent General Electric (GE).

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Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) and General Electric Co. (GE) are discussing a plan that would merge Comcast’s cable networks with GE’s NBC Universal, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In the deal under consideration, Comcast would contribute assets and cash and receive 51 percent ownership of NBC Universal in a joint venture with GE, which would own the remainder, the person says. The deal would value the assets contributed by Comcast at about $6 billion. Comcast would also contribute between $4 billion and $6 billion in cash, the person said.

The deal is still far from finalized and could still fall apart, the person said.

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So, the latest theory seems to be that Comcast (CMCSA) is in talks to buy 20-50 percent of NBC Universal, the TV/movie studio/cable/theme park company owned 80 percent by General Electric (GE) and 20 percent by Vivendi.

As I noted in a post last night, the Web site TheWrap.com yesterday asserted that Comcast had inked a deal to buy NBC Universal for $35 billion; Comcast said that was wrong, but didn’t deny being in talks.

This morning, the AP is reporting that two people familiar with the negotiations confirm talks for Comcast to acquire up to half of NBCU, including Vivendi’s stake.

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Hulu is stepping up its global initiatives to compete for audience and advertising dollars overseas.

On Monday, the video-streaming site added Johannes Larcher to its executive ranks as senior vice president of international. Mr. Larcher must work with each content provider to negotiate international rights for each video. Hulu has more than 130 content providers and 1,100 TV programs and movies, and its library continues to grow.

Certain snippets of content are already available outside the U.S. Tuesday evening’s news conference with President Barack Obama, for example, will be streamed internationally.

Hulu is a partnership between General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal and News Corp. (NWS), owner of Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal.

In international activities, Hulu trails behind Joost, an independent start-up competing in the premium online content space. Joost has a localized site for the U.K. and is viewable around the world, though content availability varies from country to country.

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Is more always better?

Hulu has expanded its content library considerably since its launch a year ago. The Internet video site has grown from 50 content partners to more than 130 and has nearly 40,000 pieces of video.

Now, in addition to the full-length TV shows that made the site popular, it has an expansive, somewhat chaotic library. The site contains everything from two-hour feature films such as Universal’s “Liar, Liar,” starring Jim Carrey, to short instructional Web videos such as “How to Make Stuffed Crust Pizza.”

Andy Forssell, Hulu’s senior vice president of content and distribution, says the goal is to provide users and advertisers with more options. Hulu is a joint venture of General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal and News Corp., (NWS) which owns Wall Street Journal (and AllThingsD.com) publisher Dow Jones.

Among the newest content partners is Condé Nast Publications Inc., the people behind magazines like Vogue and Wired. Videos from the company’s online destinations, such as Epicurious.com, a site for food aficionados, are now appearing on Hulu. They’ve added content from four sites: Epicurious, Wired.com, Style.com and Men.Style.com.

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When NBC Universal and News Corp. created Hulu, they gave the video portal a valuable but short-term asset: exclusive rights to distribute NBC and Fox shows outside of the media giants’ own websites.

From that base of content, Hulu.com has become the fourth-biggest online video distributor by unique visitors in January, behind YouTube, Yahoo and MySpace, according to the latest from Nielsen VideoCensus. In total video streams, it’s No. 3, with 232 million, behind YouTube (5.8 billion) and Yahoo (277 million).

But the exclusive part of that NBC-News Corp. deal lasts only two years, and Hulu knows all too well that the scarcity that helped it establish an audience (and brand) is going away soon. Hulu has never said exactly when the deal expires, but it’s likely within a year after the first anniversary of Hulu’s public launch, in March.

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On TV, content is king. But on the Web, community may reign supreme. Throughout television history, the way to lure most viewers was to air the best shows. It doesn’t necessarily work that way on the Web, where many shows can be seen on multiple sites.

Take the recent announcement by CBS (CBS) that it would begin airing shows like Showtime’s “Dexter” and Sony Pictures Television’s (SNE) “Bewitched” on TV.com, CBS’s online site for full-length video. But none of the more than 1,000 new programs are exclusive to TV.com. And the episodes of “Bewitched,” the classic sitcom featuring the nose-wrinkling witch Samantha, are already on rival Hulu, the joint site of NBC Universal and News Corp. (NWS). “Every major studio right now is following a nonexclusive strategy” online, says Arash Amel, senior analyst with London-based media researcher Screen Digest. “The question for these sites is beginning to be, ‘how do you differentiate yourself beyond the content you have?’”

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Mobile marketing network 4INFO plans to announce Thursday that it has received $20 million in venture funding led by Peacock Equity, a joint venture between NBC Universal and GE Commercial Finance’s media, communications and entertainment business.

4INFO works with media companies, including Yahoo (YHOO), IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACZ) and Gannett (GCI) to provide weather updates, sports scores and other information via text messages that contain small ads. The Silicon Valley start-up sends more text messages in the U.S., by volume, than any other provider, according to Nielsen. 4INFO says it delivers more than 80 million user-requested text messages per month and that its network includes 16 million users.

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Jeff Zucker, head of NBC Universal, was famously quoted earlier this year warning that the media industry had to work so “that we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies.” It’s a great line and an even better observation. But I think it’s inevitable and it’s going to happen no matter how hard they try to avoid it. Analog and digital, it turns out, are polar opposites. Analog has physical costs which lead to scarcity-driven business models. Digital has zero marginal cost (or near zero), which leads to ubiquity-driven business models.

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How is your Olympics-watching experience going?

You may have caught some of the Olympic Games over the weekend, most likely in front of your television set and not online. NBC Universal, which owns the U.S. broadcast rights, said it attracted 114 million TV viewers, which was itself an Olympic record. The Web-viewing audience was a fraction of that, although a lot better than during the last Olympics.

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Just three years ago, she was one of “three chicks with credit cards” trying to form a consortium of female bloggers.

Now, former CNN journalist Lisa Stone is championing a network of 2,200 blogs in a fresh strategic partnership with iVillage, taking on a new $5 million investment from iVillage-parent NBC Universal, and playing host to as many as eight blog-publishing conferences this year around the country. This Friday, the BlogHer conference in San Francisco is expected to attract as many as 3,000 bloggers, some of them mothers driving across the country via caravan while blogging about their trip. (Stone co-founded BlogHer in February 2005 with Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins.)

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Sometimes you wonder how the folks at NBC Universal get anything accomplished, when they seem totally unable to accept responsibility for the market challenges they face and demand that everyone else fix NBC Universal’s business-model problems. Remember, NBC Universal has been the main supporter of the idea that ISPs should be responsible for stopping any unauthorized transfer of content. But why take chances on having just one outside party prop up your business model? Now, NBC Universal’s “chief digital officer,” George Kliavkoff, is saying that it should be Apple’s responsibility to stop unauthorized usage by building special antipiracy filters into iTunes.

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