Comcast announced today its ambitious new plan to allow on demand access to a “nearly limitless” supply of movies and TV shows via both television and the internet. Dubbed Project Infinity, the goal is to bolster Comcast’s competitive position with satellite and telcos - and it hopes its stock price in the process - by offering a slick new interactive product that makes programming available almost anytime and anywhere.

The idea is actually pretty neat if they can pull it off. Core to this new product is a site called Fancast where anyone can log on and watch shows like The Practice and CSI; for free - well for now anyway. As a new online content platform, Fancast’s strategy seems to be to get eyeballs to the site, in the hopes that more eyeballs will entice content producers to allow access to their content there. Fancast’s premise is also to be the can’t-live-without portal for TV and movie buffs, where information about shows and actors can be accessed, programming line-ups can be customized and shows can be recorded even if you left town and forgot to turn on the Tivo.

But, if Project Infinity is to succeed, Comcast needs more than just eyeballs to its website, it must deliver a better value proposition for the content producers than the one it has had on the table before with the studios. That business model, which is essentially to pay them for their content once and use it – and charge for it – as many times as possible - has resulted in few takers and only about 300 on demand titles accessible via their TV platform.

Comcast says that the ongoing pricing for Project Infinity is still a work in process and that they have not yet approached the television networks or movie studios about this project. My guess is that their strategy is to drive a hard bargain once they have amassed hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. But I’m not sure that convincing the studios to play ball now will be any better than their prior promise to deliver 25 million subscribers when they first presented their on demand television deals a few years ago.

The issue for the studios isn’t how many eyeballs Comcast can deliver, it’s about how much Comcast is willing to fork over for the matching of their eyeballs with their content. For now, the studios have taken the same position that the striking writers in Hollywood have taken – don’t think you can just pay me once for something you will monetize indefinitely and expect that I am going to keep producing. I’m not saying that there aren’t other ways to monetize the eyeballs that Fancast will capture – Google has a $700/share stock price because it has monetized eyeballs via an advertising platform. Or that their programming concept isn’t interesting or potentially even game changing. But to paraphrase an old cliché, it’s the business model, stupid. Unless Comcast really internalizes the concepts that ignite these multisided markets and devises a model that provides the right incentives for the studios to get on board, Project Infinity may come to define the period of time that it will take Comcast to achieve their vision.