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With all the chatter about Apple upending the TV business as it did the music industry, you'd think the incumbent cable players were incapable of redefining the TV user experience. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts begs to differ. In an interview with Fortune, Roberts said he's taking lessons from Apple in how to "take really complicated things and make them simple, make them fun, make them beautiful and easy."

Read: CNET's Apple HDTV rumor roundup

He continued, "As I think about where I'd like to see us go, it is absolutely … Read more

Yahoo and the NBC Sports Group announced a content and promotion partnership this evening that combines the Web company's sports reporting with NBC's television presence and digital resources.

The alliance will include original video content that will appear on both Yahoo Sports and NBCSports.com, live streams of events such as "Sunday Night Football," and adoption of Yahoo Sports' fantasy platform as the exclusive game provider for NBC Sports' news and information site Rotoworld.

Financial details of the deal were not revealed. The two will maintain separate Web sites and newsrooms but will collaborate on big … Read more

Apple CEO Tim Cook will make his first TV appearance the same day his company could find out if it's getting a bevvy Samsung's smartphones permanently banned in the U.S.

Cook was interviewed earlier today at the company's Grand Central Terminal store by NBC's Brian Williams as part of a package that will air next Thursday, NBC announced today.

Photos of the interview were leaked out earlier by media tracking blog TV Newser, showing a casually dressed Cook chatting with Williams while holding Apple's products.

Cook has not done a TV appearance since taking on the role as the company's CEO last August, … Read more

NEW YORK -- A federal appeal's court here sounded highly doubtful of Aereo's claims that by using thousands of tiny Internet-connected antennas to deliver live TV to customers, the company had successfully sidestepped copyright infractions.

Aereo is the Barry Diller-backed Internet video service that currently provides users in New York with live TV. For $12 a month, Aereo will connect subscribers, via the Web, to a tiny antenna that captures over-the-air TV signals and enables them to watch TV on their PC. Aereo managers don't pay a dime to access these shows.

They should, according to the … Read more

Hackers appear to have infiltrated and defaced several NBC Web sites, including the page for "Saturday Night Live."

The page's usual content was replaced with a message that the site had been hacked by "pyknik" and scrolling text with the nursery rhyme "Remember, Remember The Fifth of November Gunpowder and Treason Plot." The message also indicated that "user info" and "passwords" had been exposed, but it was unclear where this information was allegedly taken from.

The nursery rhyme is about a conspiracy to blow up the English Parliament in … Read more

PC-TV Free Satellite TV Viewer is a stripped-down program that supposedly offers a free preview of a for-pay online satellite TV service. Though the for-pay service claims more than 3,000 channels, this program is limited to 10 channels, with no ability to edit or change the selections. While some of the channels the freeware includes seem impressive -- such as ESPN, BBC News, and Bloomberg US -- others are less so. For instance, ABC 12 Minneapolis is great if you're in or from Minnesota; likewise FOX 8 New Orleans. But since we couldn't get any of the … Read more

Friday's tech news roundup can ease symptoms of Gadget News Overload:

Twitter and NBC just don't see why so many are complaining about their Olympics partnership.

Speaking to The New York Times in an interview published yesterday, Twitter and NBC representatives said that just 0.5 percent of all tweets about the Olympics criticized the companies' partnership. All others, they say, took no issue with their deal.

Still, it's hard to diminish the sheer number of complaints that rained down on the companies as the Olympics went on. From the very beginning, tweeters were upset with NBC's decision to hold off coverage of key events to prime time. … Read more

After restoring the suspended account of journalist Guy Adams this morning, Twitter issued an apology for its "mess-up," and says it will never do it again, the company wrote in a blog post.

"As I stated earlier, we do not proactively report or remove content on behalf of other users no matter who they are," according to the post. "This behavior is not acceptable and undermines the trust our users have in us. We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content, no matter who the user is -- … Read more