Speaking on Tuesday at the Cable Show in Washington, Roberts shared his thoughts on the future of the TV industry and showed off new Comcast kit intended to provide a faster, more-connected experience. The technology included cloud service X2, which allows subscribers to customize their experience to a greater degree than previous services, showing recently watched shows, favorite apps and other types of personalized content. Roberts also showed off a 3-gigabit/sec connection capable of gulping down a movie near-instantly (see our take here).

Addressing the current cable viewing experience, Roberts acknowledged that cross-screen consumption through Comcast’s TV Everywhere is far from integrated.

“Guilty as charged that we haven’t made it as easy as it needs to be. We need to make a tablet so it automatically knows it’s you and you don’t need to authenticate,” he said, adding that Facebook would be another sign-in option.

Roberts also acknowledged people’s propensity for “binge-viewing,” which has taken off in response to offerings by Netflix and other non-traditional TV providers. In response, he said Comcast would be repeating its “Watchathon” experiment — where customers can binge on hundreds of episodes of popular shows like The Walking Dead — at least every 90 days.

The Roberts talk was part of an industry event so needless to say, there were no questions about cord-cutting, disruptors like Aereo or breaking up the cable bundle.

During this time, Roberts owned restricted stock under a bonus and 401K plan that vested due to his his tenure with the company. As a result, he acquired 3,700 new voting shares in the company and came to hold $126 million worth of Comcast stock in total.

The acquisitions meant that Roberts violated the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvement Act, a law that requires stock owners to notify regulators in some circumstances when they obtain voting shares that give them significant worth in a company.

In a press release, the FTC said the penalty was limited because Roberts’ transgression was inadvertent and a “technical” violation of the rules. It also said that the executive’s lawyers may have been to blame.

The complaint, which was filed by the Justice Department and will now be withdrawn because of the settlement, states that this the third time Roberts has violated the antitrust law. A copy is embedded below.

Antitrust complaint against Comcast CEO Brian Roberts

Roberts started the demo, which was being videotaped for the Thursday general session, by downloading the full fifth season of 30 Rock — all 23 episodes — in roughly 1 minute and 40 seconds while he talked about the evolution of the cable data delivery starting with Docsis 1.0. The download was being delivered from 11 miles away via Comcast’s Chicago cable network. When that was done, Roberts ran a speed test that showed 1080+ on the speedometer.

The crowd, mostly Comcast employees, applauded the one-take demo.

It’s not the launch of a new product and Comcast has yet to say publicly what it’s going to do with this power. It’s also not the first time Roberts has shown off download speeds. During a CES keynote in 2008, he downloaded Batman Begins plus a trailer in four minutes to tout Comcast’s Project Infinity and the potential of Wideband. Now it;s all about Xfinity — and much of Roberts showed off that day in Las Vegas is reality and some is already being used by consumers.

But this demo is a glimpse at the new consumer cable future, at least for those who will be able to afford it. And it shows that cable isn’t ceding any ground to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and its 1Gbps fiber-to-home experiment coming in Kansas City, Kan.

The intro price for the Xfinity tier: $105 a month for 12 months if subscribers get Comcast’s Triple Play. Markets launched today include San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C., Comcast’s HQ city Philadelphia, and the majority of Boston. Unfortunately for those who upload media, the highest upload rate is 10 Mbps.

The service fulfills a promise Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts made when he introduced “Project Infinity” at the 2008 CES, demonstrating the potential of tru2wy and Docsis 3.0 once it could be implemented. One example from the stage: downloading Batman Begins complete with an exclusive trailer of the next Batman sequel in four minutes with what was then called “Wideband.”

At the time, Roberts insisted what he was showing was “here, now, in the next 12 months.” Not quite. More like 40 months in a way that matters to a large enough number of Comcast customers. Speeds have been bumping up but this is the most dramatic home offer from the largest U.S cable operator. Full details in the corporate blog post by Cathy Avgiris, SVP/GM, Communications and Data Services.

Comcast plans to offer nearly 3,000 hours of video on demand via iOS and eventually Android-based tablets.

The update released Tuesday works as promised on the iPad, adding on-demand streaming over Wi-Fi to the channel guide-DVR management app Comcast released in November. It can be a little confusing at first since the instinct is to pick “on demand” when the option the user needs is “play now” but it’s fairly straightforward after that.

The featured TV choices are all from HBO, Showtime and TNT, including the Jan. 29 episode of Big Love . The number of episodes varies — five episodes of The Closer, two of Leverage, 12 from Boardwalk Empire. Featured movies are from Encore, MoviePlex, and HBO — some with gold keys signaling a premium network.Other networks at launch: Turner’s TBS and Cartoon Network, BBC America, Starz, and Cinemax. No NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) networks.

Authentication lives up to promises. I set this up several months ago in a Comcast household, anticipating this moment, and once it checked the account, repeat uses were seamless. (To be clear, I’m hundreds of miles away from that household now, testing the out-of-home access in a non-Comcast area.) Viewing isn’t instant on, taking 30-45 seconds to load on a home Wi-Fi connection. The quality for the few minutes I could spend on The Closer and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (I couldn’t resist) was good with no buffering issues, although the opening scenes of the movie were almost too dark to see at times. Fast forwarding worked fine, as did the 30-second back button — again, not instant, but quick.

It’s no Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) when it comes to movie depth — or Hulu for next-day access to current TV — but it extends the value of a cable subscription, which is what Comcast set out to do.

It’s also an achievement in another area: speed to market. No, it’s not as fast as a startup might move but it’s a heck of a lot more nimble than the usual cable company pace.

The company lost 275,000 basic subs. Digital subs were up by 219,000 but that was 52 percent fewer year over year. In addition to the fact that the number of digital video service subs fell 52 percent in the quarter.

Video competition: As for the competitive pressures on Comcast, the recent earnings figures from AT&T and Verizon tell part of the story. AT&T U-verse TV subscribers increased by 236,000 in the quarter to reach 2.7 million, while Verizon added 204,000 net new FiOS TV customers. By the end of the third quarter, Verizon had 3.3 million FiOS TV customers.

Roberts said the quarter started off weak but the numbers of video subscribers gradually ticked up in September and October. On top of that, he pointed to the impact of last year’s transition on the part of broadcasters to digital signals, which spurred higher than normal growth. The losses were also mitigated, in Roberts’ view, by the fact that 40 percent of this year’s video losses were in the “lower end basic video package.” And that has a lower impact on the revenue generated by each sub. Total revenue per video customer increased 10 percent to almost $130 per month, Roberts noted.

Advertising: Even during the worst part of the recession, cable a category tended to do better than just about all the other ad-supported mediums. As ad spending has returned, Comcast’s cable advertising has benefited, as Q3 revenue was up 27.2 percent, thanks to higher expenditures from auto companies. With Election Day approaching next week, political ad spend also provided a significant boost, rising 19 percent. Given the intensity of the races over the past month, political ad spend will also contribute greatly to Comcast’s Q4 earnings.

NBCU (NYSE: GE) expenses: The costs related to the pending NBC Universal deal also pushed profits down, as they have previously. But as Roberts pointed out, with the NBCU financing done, and the number of subs inching up over the latter part of Q3, things were starting to look up. He also noted that, despite its own advancements in the “TV Everywhere” concept, the company expected to rely on the set-top box for a long time to come.

“Since we signed the NBCU deal, most of the news has been positive, though the network still has its challenges,” said COO Steve Burke, who will succeed Jeff Zucker as CEO of NBCU once the merger is completed. “Advertising has been up and the film studios have had success. But the cable channels offer real opportunities to cross-promote. We’ve done a lot of deals over the last few years.”

– Canoe Ventures: Along with Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC), Comcast is one of the largest backers of the industry’s interactive TV effort called Canoe Ventures. The project has been plagued by coordination issues among its major MSO members, as well as the difficulty having to wrestle with different levels of technology across local markets. But Robers said that things have been moving in the right direction for Canoe. “Canoe now has 10 million homes where you can buy interactive ads” he said. “It’s doing what we wanted the interactive business to do.” The 10 million number is based on EBIF (Enhanced Binary Interchange Format, the cable industry’s interactive TV standard). Roberts appeared to concede that it will still take a while until interactive advertising yields real results.

On Netflix: In the area of VOD, Roberts was asked if he was concerned about the growth of Netflix’s streaming business. He noted that Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) execs said that during their call, that its streaming service is viewed as more complementary to other ways of watching video. Our on-demand usage is growing and we’re adding content. The iPad gives us a chance to start from scratch and use new technology. New devices are driving more usage.

Set-top box: Yesterday, Comcast took a big step forward in the TV Everywhere concept, by moving its Xfinity TV out of beta and opening more than 150,000 hours of online content to all of its digital video subs-no matter which ISP they use. While he and other executives on the call trumpeted the advancements, he was adamant that the set-top box wasn’t about to disappear anytime soon. “The world’s changing and evolving, but the most exciting products we’re working on has the set-top box as a part of that, Roberts said. “Perhaps set-top boxes will be less needed over time, but we’re not near the moment when it will go away.”

It is the kind of app we should expect from video distributors but don’t because we are far too used to them playing Lucy to our Charlie Brown with software that may look slick in a demo but fails to deliver in reality or to be distributed in anything close to real-time. Why is Xfinity Remote different?

Well, it helps when the boss thinks it makes sense. Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts, who admits he never took to video on a laptop, got an iPad — and a variation of portable video religion with it. A variation because for him it still isn’t about making video portable (although he gets why that matters for others) as much as it is seeing how devices like the iPad can be used to enhance the viewing experience and, as Roberts says, to “liberate” subscribers from the set-top.

It also helps that Roberts thinks Comcast and the cable industry need to show some urgency, “to speed up the pace of innovation.” The coding for the version being demoed was finished at the show the night before Roberts’ video demo was show, the app was being live demoed on the floor of the show as soon as his session was done — and Comcast execs expect at least one version to be available to subscribers in this quarter. Given the years it can sometimes take to turn an idea into usable reality in the cable world, that’s moving fast. It helps that iPhone and now iPad users are already trained to expect constant iteration of apps.

It might have been more expected to come out first with a Fancast Xfinity video player for the iPad. But going this route lets Comcast take advantage of a lot of work that’s already been done with navigation, search, program guide design and the adoption of EBIF (Enhanced Binary Interchange Format). EBIF is the cable industry’s interactive TV standard; it isn’t omnipresent yet but EBIF apps can be used in millions of Comcast households. One example of EBIF at work and play: users can see when Comcast subscribers in their contacts are online and through the app, suggest they check out a show or a movie. If the other subscriber agrees, the app sends a message to his or her set-top box to switch channels to that show.

The version Comcast demoed Wednesday is based on Safari for iPad, managed by messages sent from the browser to set-tops through EBIF. The company also plans to submit a native iPad app to the iTunes store. Comcast doesn’t charge subs for its mobile app that allows management of various services including remote programming of DVRs in some markets, and programming guides for TV and VOD, and this one is expected to be free as well.

Roberts told me after he wowed the cable crowd by introducing the app that the iPad is just the beginning and we can expect to see it ripple across devices; he also said he expects other cable operators will offer versions. Other cable CEOs I’ve talked to were impressed with what Comcast showed and the potential for them. Talking with Roberts, it’s clear he is flat-out passionate about Xfinity Remote — that it can be done, that it’s being done, what it can do.

Now Comcast has to deliver on the promise.

Hollywood vet Chernin has a particularly unusual perspective: the former COO of News Corp (NYSE: NWS). was a Comcast consultant when the company was putting together the pending deal with GE for control of NBC Universal (NYSE: GE). The content response was to a question about his biggest disappointments. “Success is seductive,” Chernin said, “but most people really learn from their failures and their shortcomings.” “We didn’t rehearse that one,” Roberts replied, a little nonplussed. His first answer? “We didn’t pick up on content early enough.”

Later Roberts brought up some advice Chernin gave him during due diligence: “Don’t do this deal if you can