Two seemingly unrelated announcements this week illustrate the intensifying pressure on cable TV’s business model. Comcast (CMCSA) announced this week that it would make more cable-TV programming available free through the Internet by the end of the year but only to people who get broadband and cable service from Comcast.

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On a slow news day, The Wall Street Journal has dusted off the old telco-buys-sat TV company rumors.

In a Heard on the Street piece, The Journal says that the odds of Verizon (VZ) buying DirecTV (DTV) could be shortening. The theory is based on Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg’s recent remark that he wants to make video the company’s core product for its fixed-line business; the story asserts that the best way to do that would be to buy a satellite TV company–and that the best one to buy would be DTV.

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Silicon Valley has been talking for 15 years or so about marrying TV and the Internet. For the most part, it’s still just talk; most people still use their PCs when they want interactivity, and rely on their TVs when they want to be passive content-watchers.

But Intel (INTC) is not giving up. The chip giant, having run along with partners down most of the blind alleys of interactive television, gave an update this week about a reformulated TV strategy that might be paraphrased as follows: it’s the software, stupid.

In other words, people don’t want to visit Web sites or engage in other PC-like activities while relaxing in front of their big-screen TV.

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TV Everywhere is a concept put out by TV distributors that basically says that if you pay for cable or satellite, you should be able to watch the content you want, where you want. Everywhere. To some people this is not a good idea.

As is always the case, many people think tv programming should be widely available for free on the internet. Of course the content is never free. Someone has to pay to create it and we purchasers of cable and satellite services pay the subscription fees that pay the content companies and allow them to create all that content.

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With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition. A case-study of our post-journalistic age.

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Metacafe, seeking to reach more “media-snacking” consumers, is launching a section of its video site devoted to short clips from “Nurse Jackie,” “Weeds,” “Big Brother” and other television shows.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company, which is funded by Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures, focuses on what it sees as a middle ground between YouTube and Hulu–short-form videos that are professionally produced or poised to go viral–said its chief executive, Erick Hachenburg, a former Electronics Arts (ERTS) executive.

YouTube has a high percentage of personal or response videos, he said, while Hulu is where consumers go to watch an entire TV episode. Metacafe.com, in contrast, is pared down to channels for movie trailers, sports clips and music videos. It had about 7.3 million unique video viewers in April, according to comScore (SCOR), compared with Hulu’s 40.1 million uniques.

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Just what, exactly, are all those Hollywood types getting in return for their investment in Barack Obama’s presidential bid? The Justice Department, a steady ally for the entertainment industry on copyright issues during the Bush administration, today opposed the studios in a potentially precedent-setting dispute with Cablevision over TV recording services.

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AT&T and the union representing its workers are still in contract talks, but workers have published a song, with accompanying ringtone, called “Ready to Strike,” just in case.

The song’s pro-labor lyrics include “Get ready to strike, get ready to walk the line” and “Protect my health care, don’t lower my wages/Realize, recognize, mobilize, stay alive” and even a shout-out to technicians who support U-verse, AT&T’s TV service.

It was co-written by Ray and Rachael Rodriguez, AT&T (T) employees who are active in the Communications Workers of America Local 6222, as well as Riley Wallace, a Toronto hip-hop artist whose stage name is Special.

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As I said in my post last Sunday on Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” ads, it’s unrealistic to expect TV commercials to contribute to a thoughtful discussion of anything. An exercise in comparison shopping between Windows and PCs that takes place in a sixty-second Microsoft (MSFT) commercial just isn’t going to be fair and balanced, any more than an Apple (AAPL) commercial is going to explain that it’s possible to get respectable Windows laptops for a whole lot less than the cheapest Macs.

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While the very phrase “product placement” elicits jeers and hisses in the TV and movie worlds, on the Web something surprising has been happening: Branded content is emerging as not just a promising way to make money, but as creatively viable as well. Take Ashton Kutcher’s “Blah Girls,” which features sassy teen celebrity-bloggers who pause occasionally to quaff VitaminWater as they chase celebrity dirt.

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About 20 years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It’s clear now that even by using the word “convergence” we were giving TV too much credit. This won’t be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call “TV shows,” but they’ll watch them mostly on computers.

What decided the contest for computers? Four forces, three of which one could have predicted, and one that would have been harder to.

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Walking into Gavin Purcell’s office at 30 Rockefeller Center the first thing you notice is his computer monitor. It’s a 52-inch flat screen mounted to the wall across from his desk. The desktop background is a picture of a Sega Light Phaser.

Ladies and gentleman, the co-producer of NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon”–debuting Monday–is a geek.

Or at least the former producer of G4’s Attack of the Show, is geek-y. He’s not stuck in a basement somewhere uploading pictures to 4chan, but he knows what 4chan is.

The point is that Gavin and his team are bringing a new sensibility to the business of making a late-night talk show. It’s one that they developed by living in an Internet-connected world. “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” will be a talk show for the Twitter era.

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The nation’s switch to all-digital broadcasts has been more than a decade in the making. The federal government has spent nearly $2 billion to help people prepare. Broadcasters spent another $1.2 billion to run warning ads and millions more to upgrade equipment. Until last week, the United States seemed ready to follow the half-dozen European countries that have made the switch.

But with two federal agencies in charge, no clear idea of how many people would be affected and constant partisan disagreements over money, the program foundered just before its longstanding Feb. 17 deadline. It has now been pushed back four months.

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Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs.

Susan Wojcicki, the millionaire sister-in-law of Brin who also holds a management role in the company, announced the job cuts in a blog post, as she laid out plans for Google (GOOG) to exit the business of brokering radio ads, a business it entered in 2006 when it bought dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million.

Up to 40 Googlers will lose their jobs, a small percentage of the 20,000 remaining employees at the search giant. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.

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