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| Maybe, The way I see it, this is almost like an expanded beta. By opening it up to everybody, but still tieing it to your home internet connection (thru comcast), it allows them to more fully loadtest the servers than the limited beta's they have been running.
It also would give us the ability to comment on interface and usability issues, while they continue to work out the kinks in whatever expanded authentication process they are working on.
As for them selling this ala carte? I doubt it, at least yet. Besides the obvious comments about Comcast not wanting to cannibalize their TV business for this, I wouldn't be surprised if their contracts with the various content providers would limit their ability to do it also.
Home VOD vs Online VOD? In theory they could offer a lot more content online than they could in their current TV based VOD system since it's trivial these days to do web based load balancing, distributed storage, etc. I'm not entirely sure if the current VOD providers the MSO's use have a reliable and speedy version of their existing products available with that kind of expandability and redundancy.
And I think I've read before that this online on demand product DOES count against the cap, for the very net neutrality reasons some of you are complaining about. By counting their product against the caps it would prevent them from giving it an unfair advantage over hulu, netflix, etc.
Of course, the bright side is that if they see a sudden increase in the majority of their customer's net usage after this launch, it's more likely they'd raise the caps to accommodate the usage of their product offerings, also benefitting those other web usages. (It's not like Comcast has announced any plans, or even hinted at any sort of overage charges like some other MSO's. Their cap was more along the lines of putting a hard number on their old invisable cap, which from what I've seen they've been pretty soft in even enforcing.)
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