Investing in the enemy? Comcast becomes a P2P stakeholder.

What’s this? After telling us the P2P traffic is the arch nemesis of all things good on their network, Comcast investing in a P2P video delivery network.

Seattle-based GridNetworks on Monday said that Comcast would make an unspecified investment in the company and collaborate on developing so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing techniques that are “friendly” to Internet service providers.

Comcast, the country’s second largest Internet service provider, hampers some file-sharing traffic by its subscribers in an attempt to keep the traffic from slowing down Web surfing by other subscribers. Complaints by consumer groups and legal scholars that the company is discriminating against particular software have led to an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission.

Comcast has said that it will stop targeting specific types of traffic by the end of the year. It has also reached out to file-sharing companies to try to develop mutually acceptable techniques. (Yahoo)

The more conspiracy minded may think Comcast is buying in to collect more useful data on new ways to meddle with P2P traffic. I think the scenario that is closer reality is someone in the tech dept has convinced the suits that P2P is likely to be the most efficient way to do IPTV for themselves. Perhaps they could be even more forward thinking to understand doing TVoIP to any network (not just their own) may be the real path to growth for any content provider. Naw, maybe they are not quite that smart. One thing for sure, mixed signals that continue to come out of this company show a real disconnect between technology and operations .