• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, November 18, 2010

By early spring, Cablevision plans to launch a service that can turn the iPad into a mobile TV screen at home. 

"You'll have our full cable television service on it in the home," COO Tom Rutledge said Thursday at an investor event. The launch could come toward the end of the first quarter next year, or early in the second, he said.

Comcast also said it will debut a service later this year allowing customers to watch some content on the iPad. Rutledge said Cablevision is actively pursuing rights to also allow out-of-home access, possibly using a pay-VOD model.

"We've put the infrastructure in place to do that ... depending on the rights structure, we'll be able to feed that content either to the [iPad in the] home as cable TV service, or we'll be able to feed it out of the home, [to] wherever the customer is, in whatever country they are," he said.

Cablevision already allows customers to control their DVRs from an iPad, and Rutledge says the devices have further potential as a kind of souped-up interactive program guide, particularly in relation to VOD.

"One of the values of Netflix is the fact that you can navigate it so easily and order a piece of VOD out of a huge menu," he said. "That is not easy to do on a television because of the nature of the remote and the set-top box. But if you can do that from an iPad and have it play on the TV, it makes our existing VOD assets a much more valuable transactional thing -- and just makes managing content easier."