Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) remains troubled. Just look at the second-quarter report that was released on Thursday after the bell. Net sales dropped over 20%, coming in at roughly $1 billion. The company lost 19 cents per share, one penny better than the loss reported in the year-ago period (to which I say, big deal!). According to the preview, the market wanted to see $1.1 billion for the top line and a loss of only 12 cents for the bottom line. A failure on both counts, I'm afraid.

Cash flow was the more attractive part of the Q2 story. The company calculated its free cash flow to be about $109 million. Okay, I'll give Blockbuster a good mark for having positive cash flow this year.

Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA), the high-profile cable and Internet provider, produced some good second-quarter stats on Thursday. Reuters says that the 33 cents per share earned in the period beat estimates by 7 cents. According to the company press release, sales increased over 4% and operating cash flow expanded by over 5%. Free cash flow, however, was flat in Q2.

That wasn't a big deal, though. The free cash covered both the dividend and the monies used to repurchase shares. In fact, Reuters reported that the buyback activity in the quarter represented a resumption of the program. We can take that as a positive sign of confidence from management.

The recession has not changed the Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) shareholder value proposition: namely, that delivery of software on demand requires a lower up-front investment and offers increased vendor accountability, with flexible subscription pricing, among other benefits.

What the recession has changed is the rate of sales growth for CRM, which is expected to slow to the 15-18% range in FY2009. In short, CRM's customers have slowed software implementations, due to the prolonged economic contraction. The First Call FY2009/FY2010 EPS estimates for CRM are 60 cents to 79 cents.

Thanks to Jason Voorhees and Jennifer Aniston, Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) had a very successful weekend at the box office, as Steven Mallas pointed out earlier. It was a different story, however, for Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC), which quickly saw a nice offer unravel into a customer-service nightmare.

For Valentine's weekend, the company had offered its Southern California customers a so-called "1 Cent Love N' Movies Deal," featuring 40 movies on demand for a penny each. Titles included romantic favorites such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sixteen Candles, and Love Actually, along with some newer titles including Burn After Reading.

So what's the problem? According to the OC register, the promotion "attracted three times more viewers than the company anticipated," leading to movies that were unable to be watched. Angered customers can call customer service and receive a coupon good for one one-penny movie. But, as the register points out, the coupon will only be sent to those proactive enough to call in.

Additionally, this fiasco puts the promotion into the news, likely prompting Midwesterners and East-Coasters to wonder why they, too, weren't deemed worthy of such "special" treatment?

Beth Gaston Moon works for WeSeed.com. The above comments are not intended as trading or investment advice.

Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) will bombard its customers with content. It is opening a new business that will offer its cable subscribers a massive library of films and TV shows that they can also watch on the internet. Comcast hopes to offer up to 6,000 movies.

According to The New York Times, "Comcast is already the world's largest buyer of content, and it is spending about $4.5 billion a year to assemble content from around the world to offer on demand."

While Comcast's TV offerings will be only available to subscribers, its internet video site will be open to the public. But how does that help the company? Comcast is up against established internet video sites, ranging from YouTube to the higher end Hulu. There is abundant video material already on the web.

From a cable VOD standpoint, most consumers only watch the most popular films. Having thousands of extra films is hardly likely to bring in extra subscribers.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Founded in 1999, Intacct is now a key player in the on-demand software space. The focus is on enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size companies (of which there are about 2,000 customers).

To ramp up growth, the company raised $14 million in venture capital. The investors include Sigma Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Emergence Capital Partners.

I had a chance to interview the company's CEO, Mike Braun. He is a veteran of the tech world, having worked at high level positions for IBM (NYSE: IBM) as well as a variety of upstart companies.

Q: Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) just reported a record quarter. What's your perspective on the company's future growth prospects?

A: It was a fantastic quarter -- further demonstrating the momentum of the new "on-demand" computing model. Salesforce continues to focus on new customer acquisition, which drives high expenses in the near term, but you can get a preview on the future by looking at the cash flow growth of 197% YTY. Once companies move to this delivery model, whether with salesforce.com or Intacct, they love it and will stay for life.

I admit it. I'm a Mark Cuban addict. It's okay though, I can give it up at any time, I swear. For now though, I won't stop reading Mark Cuban. He's just so real, so genuine. He's the kind of guy I'd like to have living across the street from me just so I could go over and offer him a beer once in a while (if I still drank beer that is). In any case, at least once a week I need a fix of Cubanism, so I trek over to The Blog Maverick to see what Mr. Cuban is writing about.

Mark Cuban has put an interesting spin on this broadband video subject. It's an angle that I never really thought about. He suggests that we may be looking at this content delivery stream from a reverse perspective. His assertion is that while we are all wondering how to get our favorite internet content from our PCs into our TVs, we're missing the fact that the delivery apparatus is already there! Mark Cuban puts forward the proposition that internet content such as YouTube (NASDAQ:GOOG) could be presented to our televisions from the provider end rather than the user end of the proposition!!! Egads! Why didn't I think of that? (I guess that's why he's Mark Cuban and I'm not ).

The proposition is so simple that it makes me wonder why we haven't caught on that it's being done already. Every pay-per-view service that was ever subscribed to via cable or satellite is exactly the thing we're asking to have given to us, video on demand. When you add in the fundamentals of the current video gaming formats via Play Station, XBox and similar, then the circle is completed and you have "interactive video of choice on demand.".The trick is to get our televised entertainment providers to tap into the internet servers and start providing us that content. We would simply subscribe to our data streams of choice and they would "download" to our televisions via our DVRs. Total availability, total control and total recording ability would then be ours.

It sounds quite simple the way Mark Cuban describes it, but I must admit that almost everything does.