If you ask me, at first blush this seems like bad move on Netflix's part. If Comcast or any other ISP throttled Netflix too much the subscriber blow back would be so hot, customer service lines would blow up... Why pay a bunch of money to the ISP, when their customers will blame the ISP, not Netflix, for poor service. On the other hand, Netflix traffic is by far the biggest throttler of the Internet, gobbling 30+% of the bandwidth and they appear to have gone beyond their bandwidth consumption thresholds. Also, while I'm personally a huge advocate for net neutrality, Comcast isn't likely to even able to won't be able to sniff an end to neutrality for another 10 years or so once the merger with TWC is completed (assuming conditions with FCC are re-upped in order to close this deal). I wish more details about this deal had surfaced, because if the amount Netflix paid is obscene it does seem to potentially limit some smaller players / upstarts that are trying to bring disruptions to market, which is bad news, but something had to give at some point.
I think this deal benefits consumers as long as it doesn't go so far as to create a so called paid fast lane for certain web sites at the expense of others. I mean Netflix is such a huge suck of bandwidth they need the speed bost to offer a better product but many other non video intensive sites do not. I think it's a good idea from Netflix's perspective, they had to have been thinking about the issue of content delivery for a long time until now. I guess what I'm saying is if this is just a solution for sites that need to transmit huge amounts of data no one is really losing here.
I don't think we have any evidence that ISPs are going to play nice and limit schemes like this to sites that "need to transmit huge amounts of data." Their history seems to say otherwise.