The country’s largest cable-service provider soon will start testing a new way to deliver its television channels, co-opting the same technology standard that upstart Internet rivals have used to challenge traditional pay-TV business models.

Using the MIT campus as its proving ground, Comcast in coming months will try delivering TV channels using the same standard used to deliver data over the Internet, known as the Internet protocol, or IP.

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At issue is a condition proposed by the Federal Communications Commission that would require Comcast to offer NBC programming to any online video service that has reached a similar deal for content from at least one of NBC’s competitors, such as Walt Disney Co. or News Corp.

Lobbyists for both Disney and News Corp., along with Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes, have been voicing their concerns this week with the FCC, worried that such conditions could undermine their own efforts to profit from the nascent online video industry. News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.

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Fanhattan, previously known as Vuze, on Thursday announced a service of the same name that will provide a single interface from which consumers can search for movies and television shows from a variety of distributors of online video. In theory, the distributors Fanhattan can search include Netflix, Apple’s iTunes Store, Hulu, Amazon and others, though Fanhattan doesn’t yet have deals with those providers.

The problem the company is seeking to address will be familiar to power users of Web video. No single source of online video provides anything remotely approaching a comprehensive selection of movies and television shows, in large part because of arcane Hollywood licensing schemes that dictate when certain material can be made available through which distribution vehicle and under which pricing models (rental, sales and subscription services).

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Starting Monday, Web-to-TV software company Boxee will distribute the National Hockey League’s Game Center Live online video content. In addition, the National Basketball Association is set to announce a similar partnership with Roku, maker of a digital video player that streams Netflix (NFLX) and Amazon (AMZN) Video on Demand via the Web, for the distribution of NBA digital video content, beginning with some of this season’s playoff games.

The NHL’s Game Center Live streams approximately a thousand of the league’s 1,200 games per season, or any games that are not national exclusives on Versus or NBC, the league’s partner networks, for $19.95 a month. No additional fees will be applied for the streaming of NHL Game Center Live content through Boxee’s social-media enabled, web-to-TV platform. Since the NHL is currently wrapping up its 2009-2010 season, the new NHL content available through the Boxee platform is minimal, but a spokesman for Boxee says this should lay the groundwork for a continued partnership into next season.

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Baidu is launching a new business unit that it envisions will work on a similar business model to Hulu, an advertising-supported video site in the U.S. that has licensed, copyrighted content from several television broadcasters.

Hulu, which is not available in China, is jointly owned by NBC Universal, Walt Disney Co. (DIS), and News Corp. (NWS). News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.

“As the country’s leading search engine, we’d like to grow in this space to meet our users’ needs. We see large volumes of our users searching for high-quality licensed videos and currently there are no video sites that can fulfill this need,” said Ren Xuyang, vice president of marketing and business development at Baidu.

But Baidu will be competing with many other players all eyeing the same market opportunity in China, such as online video sharing sites Youku.com and Tudou.com.

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News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.

And a good reminder that even though Google’s (GOOG) YouTube generates more than five billion streams a month and Hulu has grown 490 percent in the last year, no one has really figured out a good way to turn all those eyeballs into dollars. Yet.

A short cheat sheet: The guys on the left side of the table are College Humor co-founders Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen, who sold their company to IAC (IACI) in 2006, yet remain employed by Barry Diller. They’re also pretty sharp business guys, it turns out. The guys on the right side are Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld, College Humor employees who have had a long-running series of clips on the site. Dina Kaplan, who gets name-checked several times, is COO of New York-based video site Blip.tv, which happens to be the distributor of this clip.

No word on valuation for the company, or the total amount raised to date. If anyone wants to weigh in, you can reach me at peter@allthingsd.com.

FreeWheel is essentially an online ad video network operating behind the scenes and connecting Web video advertisers and publishers. If that sounds a bit like DoubleClick, the display ad infrastructure company that Google (GOOG) acquired last year, that’s not a coincidence. Co-founders Doug Knopper and Jon Heller are both DoubleClick vets.

FreeWheel won’t disclose most of its customers, but it’s been watched widely by Web video players to see if can make good on its promise to make the fractured market more efficient. That’d be an important problem to solve for the Web video industry, which has yet to deliver on its huge promise.