Actually, Comcast would love to be able to ditch the local networks. They currently have to pay local station owners for distribution rights in the form of retr

Actually, Comcast would love to be able to ditch the local networks. They currently have to pay local station owners for distribution rights in the form of retransmission agreements. This way, CBS will be paying for a commercial CDN because, well, that's what you have to do when you distribute video over the Internet if you want decent performance (and there are lots of business and technical reasons for this). Most commercial CDNs have had interconnect agreements with all the large ISPs for over a decade.