It depends on who's lying. Level 3 said they wanted the additional fee for video. Comcast says it's just an imbalance in the amount of data in their existing peering agreement, REGARDLESS of the type of traffic.
Personally, I'm more willing to believe Comcast here. Imbalances can happen for a huge number of different reasons. This one is obvious: they're going to be taking on a HUGE amount of extra data from Level 3 specifically because of Netflix.
Think of it this way, if roughly the same amount of data is going back and forth, they both can say "it's about even, so we're not going to charge each other." But if suddenly a LOT more is going one way than the other, then they can start charging more. It's no different than me going to my ISP and saying "I'm going to increase the amount I'm uploading by 10x, but you'll still charge the same right? You mean you want to charge me more now? But YOU are requesting a bit from me still! What do you mean no?" That's what Level 3 is doing by the sounds of it.
"We do our own fundraising, and have eleven club mentors, most of whom are professional engineers, working with us." said Rebecca LohKamp, the club's main mentor. "The last printout from the school I saw shows they are holding $7,500, funds dedicated to ‘Team 1432’,” LohKamp added. “Now they claim the money that we raised was given to the school, and might now belong to the school district."
Franklin High Business Manager, Steve Matthews, told The Bee that Franklin High is supporting the MESA program instead of the FIRST, and "can't do both". This is odd, because MESA, a supplier of military and law enforcement robots, doesn't offer any educational support on their website, while FIRST is specifically designed for educational institutions. Since the story hit The Bee, it was picked up by Fark, subsequently reddited, and even Tweeted by Mythbuster's Adam Savage and Grant Imahara
Hackers of the world, unite!