Comcast has started to roll out software updates to New England customers, turning their Motorola set-top boxes into nearly full-fledged TiVo machines. Cox is planning to follow suit in its Rhode Island and Connecticut coverage areas, and is currently running through technical trials. TiVo is busy talking to other cable operators around the country, and the new distribution channels should make the DirecTV defection a distant memory soon enough.

All is not wine and roses for TiVo, despite all this good news. The DVR might become a footnote in entertainment history if video on demand ever becomes all that it can be. Who needs to mess around with recording schedules when everything is available on a moment's notice, at your convenience? That's yet another reason for TiVo to look deeper into the software sector,and apply its considerable interface expertise to the VOD market. That breaking point is still years away, though. Stay tuned.

Safari 3.1 is the first non-beta release of Safari for Windows. Along with the Mac version, 3.1 brings support for CSS Web fonts and animations, and improves existing support for SVG and HTML 5. There are also a handful of performance and stability improvements rolled into the release, as well.

Compliance without stability is pointless, however. Fortunately, Safari 3.1 for Windows is now a stable, usable web browser. We couldn't say that about Safari on Windows before, but now that we've been testing it for a few days, we can tell you this: it's a night and day difference to the beta we saw last summer. I've had one crash in two days, and others in the lab report similar results (and there is a building consensus that the problem is caused by Flash). That puts it on the same stability level as the other major Windows browsers.

Memory usage is good, too. Safari uses about the same amount of memory as Firefox, pre-memory leak. That is, Safari and Firefox have similar memory footprints at startup, but after you use both for several hours, they start to diverge. Firefox's notorious problems with memory leaks are to blame, so Safari ends up using 25 to 50 percent less memory, keeping it from getting sluggish and unstable. This is something we expect to see greatly improved with Firefox 3.0.

CASTING UPDATE....
Latest cast additions just confirmed - John Hodgman, Tina Fey, Christopher Guest, Jeffrey Tambor join Louis CK, Rob Lowe, Jonah Hill, Jennifer Garner.
Oh and me, Ricky Gervais, obviously. Not a bad cast for a comedy.

Colbert's news-skewering program will be calling its coverage "The Colbert Report: Dorito's Spicy Sweet Pennsylvania Primary Coverage From Chili-delphia -- the City of Brotherly Crunch!," a nod to Colbert's new partnership with "the first name in electoral snacking."

The show will be taped at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and will continue to air at 11:30 p.m.

According to Weiss, the upcoming batch of "Entourage" eps will pick up where the show's fourth season left off: the disastrous Cannes screening of "Medellin." The show's characters must suck up the financial hit they took from funding the dog of a project -- and what it means to Vince's acting (and Eric's managing) career.

"It could be a pretty interesting season," Weiss said. "It will be very true to what you see actors go through after a movie like that."

So here's the plan: we've teamed up with YouTube to host a "film festival" around Ghosts. The concept is for you to take whatever tracks you feel inspired by from Ghosts and create what you feel should accompany them visually. You will be able to see all of the submissions, and a team of us (including me) will be sorting through them and setting aside ones we feel are exceptional.

Eventually (within a couple of months?) we will present a virtual "film festival" with me and some special guests presenting selections of your work. This isn't a contest and you don't win elaborate prizes - it's meant to be an experiment in collaboration and a chance for us to interact beyond the typical one-way artist-to-fan relationship. We've discussed some interesting ways this could go, including multiple installments of the online "film festivals," to broadcast TV specials, to a one-time live performance of the entire Ghosts record with your visuals involved. It really depends on how this progresses and develops.

We are all very much looking forward to what you come up with, and hope you enjoy the experience. Visit our YouTube channel later today for information on how to participate.

The producers of the Emmy-winning series are developing a two-hour "prequel" to the upcoming seventh season. The movie, designed to bridge the two-year gap between Seasons 6 and 7, is targeted to air in the fall, leading to the January return of the real-time drama. On Wednesday, "24" producers began securing the show's core cast members for the film.

At the end of the writers strike, there were rumblings about a possible split of the seventh season into two parts to air in the fall and in midseason. But Fox was quick to put those rumors to rest, reiterating that the show's scheduling pattern will remain intact with a January launch.

The "24" writing team is back at work, with filming on the remaining episodes of the seventh season slated to begin in April. Missing from the writers room is the series co-creator/executive producer Joel Surnow, who left at the end of the strike. Since the fifth season, "24" has been run by exec producer Howard Gordon.

[Turner Entertainment president Steve Koonin] said TNT has 14 drama series projects percolating from such notables as Ridley Scott, Robert Redford, Mark Burnett and Steven Bochco.

One key reason Turner is forging ahead now, Koonin said, is that "the talent is coming to us." Top showrunners, he said, are becoming increasingly frustrated by the content constraints at the broadcast nets, which are getting pummeled with increasingly bigger fines from the FCC in response to vocal complaints from parents groups. By contrast, Koonin said, the Turner networks "are pushing the boundaries of content and building a marketing platform for these series to be successful."

The scripted TNT projects disclosed for the first time are an untitled family drama set in 1950s Indiana from Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh; an untitled crime thriller set in Boston derived from the bestselling mystery novels of Tess Gerritsen; and DreamWorks' "The Genie Chronicles," a fantasy-adventure about a female newspaper reporter who discovers a magic lamp with a genie.

TNT's reality shows in development include "Wedding Day," from Burnett and DreamWorks, which showers prizes on a new bride and groom in each episode; "Lean on Me," which focuses on the unsung mentors of people who became famous; "Crimes of the Century," a Scott Free production anatomizing the most eye-opening crimes since the early 1900s; "Shadow of a Doubt," a true-crime series dealing with people who commit murder without premeditation; and "Behind the Drama," whose goal is to tell the stories that led to famous movies and TV dramas.

Two previously announced TNT series have the go-ahead: "Raising the Bar" (working title), a legal drama from Bochco and ABC Studios; and "Leverage," a "Mission: Impossible"-like thriller from Dean Devlin's Electric Entertainment. Warner Horizon has produced the pilot of ad-agency drama "Truth in Advertising." In development is "Generations," a time-shifting drama about three generations of a family that have lived in the same house, from Redford and scribe John Sacret Young.

TNT sibling TBS is also moving aggressively into original series, with the focus on comedy. Helmer Betty Thomas and Elaine Pope are working on a project about a middle-aged single woman. Two others pilot scripts are in development, one from Dave Caplan and the other from Brian Hargrove.

TBS also has five latenight series in the works, including pilot greenlights of a new version of "Match Game" and of "Stay Tooned," an umbrella title for satirical animated shorts.

Two other shows in development are sketch comedies from the Jim Henson Co. and Robert Townsend. The fifth is a Mafia-themed comedy from Warner Horizon and Mark Wolper.