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Mark Cuban on the future of HD Media
kcmarshall writes "Mark Cuban's most recent blog post talks about what media will carry HD movies and content. The post makes it obvious that he's not a typical exec with a secretary who checks his email for him. He writes about ripping DVDs "that [he] had PURCHASED" to keychain drives and copying HD content to an external FireWire drive. He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats."
I would like to think Marky is a really great Tech Leader after all, he did sell his company to Yahoo for more than I can remember making him several hundred million in the transaction purchasing the Dallas Mavericks to entertain him (living pretty good). But then you get to read his blog and he just now has discovered the compression algorithms everyone has been using to put DVD on CD (SVCD at 600 or so MB). He thinks that making larger formats is going to thwart piracy yet he didn't connect the dots where you can always take a higher format and compress it to a lower quality format of any size you want. Lets say that today we would have 50gb HD-DVDs what would prevent me from squeezing that file to 600mb know? Piracy isn't the problem, it the business model. People want to view a moving they OWN on whatever media they choose. In fact the best of all worlds would be to have a Google type service where you purchase a movie and it is stored online for you. You can watch it whenever, put it on whatever media and sell your rights after your done. The future of media is not Video On Demand (that was last year) it Video On Demand ownership over Wireless (well maybe not the ownership).
"He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats."
That'll last for a few years. I remember the same argument for DVDs and CDs before them.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I'll get more bandwidth.
A decade ago, downloading an mp3/ogg would've taken me a long while (that was probably 28.8 modem days.) Now it's done almost before I begin.
5 years ago, download a CD/movie would've taken me a long while. Today it's a reasonable period of time.
Today, a DVD takes me a while to download. Overnight usually. But you know what? With Verizon and other companies getting ready to offer services at up to 30 Mbps, I'm pretty sure my downloads are about to get faster again.
...will simply meet file translation and compression utilities.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Someone thinking of how to use technological innovations for profit instead of viewing them as Pure Evil(tm)?
Incredible. I love it.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Yeah, transfering 4.7GB of data across the internet was totally out of the question in 1997 (unless you were in college on ethernet), but now I could grab a 4.7GB image from a Torrent within a day with my cable modem connection. So what'll stop us from downloading 200GB super-HD movies across our mega-super-broadband in 2011? Didn't RFTA.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I agree that this is an obviously effective countermeasure to piracy since storage is so cheap (and getting cheaper). Shouldn't they be trying a little harder to maximize the potential of existing or near-future tech to fight piracy? I could use a 10,000 character password to keep you out of my account, but wouldn't a complex short password be a hell of a lot more practical? Seems wasteful and kind of a cop-out. A "the bad guys have already won" kind of attitude
Bigger files will prevent copywrite infringment for a short while, until computers advance a year or two, and can them easily handle more data.
When I bought a P90 in the 1990s, the idea that you could put an entire album of music on a drive was silly. Hard drives were 500mb to 800mb at the time, and 16 bit 44100 for two channels filled hundreds of megs in uncompressed format. Then MP3 compression appeared, along with Multi-gigabyte drives.
Go ahead, use larger file formats. The pirates of tomorrow will appreciate the extra quailty.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
People will always download anything at any size if they want it bad enough. People sleep and their computers don't.
Just like there was a conspiracy rumor about government preventing the 100mbps network deployment to people's home because it just promotes pirating even more. Bullshit? I dunno.
"I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand. That is in spite of the fact that HDTV has been in the clear, over the air since 1998."
/me raises hand a few hundred times... I realize I am in a small (but growing) group of people, but I download HD content on a regular basis. Not just DVD resolution HD transcodes, but full 720p and 1080i MPEG-2 transport streams, XviD rips, and WMV9. Mark is right that less people will download as files get bigger, but bandwidth is on the upswing again (6mbps seems to be becoming more widespread for cable modems), and more efficient codecs like h.264 will help bring down sizes again. Not to mention borrowing media from your friends. Size will only slow down, not stop piracy.
;)
Mark's assertion that by this time next year we'll be looking at 1TB drives for 25 cents per GB might be a bit optimistic as well.
I suspect the people still working in digital multimedia would be less interested in Mark's wisdom on technology than in his advice on the optimum time to sell their soon-to-be-worthless company to Yahoo and buy a basketball team...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
If that happens then the only people who can pirate movies will be people with a lot of bandwidth/high speed internet connections. Then you are going to see wacky legislation come into play where the Government will prosecute anybody who has anything more then a cable modem coming into his or her house. Good times.
-Dipster
This has to be one of the most short sighted solutions I've heard. Firstly compression would always yield some content at current formats even if the source was larger. Even more predictably, after a few years the larger formats would easily fit on emerging media and devices as data density increases and costs continue to decline. Most obviously any larger format would require a media for public distribution, say HD-DVD and that format would almost immediately be adopted by the PC industry as a denser data format allowing unencrypted content of the equivalent size & quality to be ripped and burned after a quick visit to Fry's.
From the article: "The bigger question, the Billion Dollar question is how to deliver content on or to hard drives, regardless of size and capacity, in a way that consumers will enjoy it, and do it cost effectively today?"
That really is the big question...there are many people out there who enjoy DVDs that don't understand enough about computers to mess with hard drives. People generally don't seem to like change, and would probably rather stick with DVDs than switch to a new format. This is all idle speculation on my part though...
You should fight piracy by making what you sell higher quality, so that anything you could easily pirate would be a cheap knockoff of what you can give them for a fee. This would be almost a shareware-like system, where you could get a crippled version for free, and, if you like it, pay money for the high quality, full version.
This would make piracy tolerable, since it would be more of a "try-before-you-buy" sort of system.
So by delivering content on Hard Drives rather than DVDs, we will be able to continue to increase the picture quality for years to come.
This is true in one aspect, but the HD storage medium is one that may not hold up to these increased picture qualities. Seemingly endless in capacity, there may be a faster transfer mechanism on a new storage medium (bio-organic?) that would be necessary to transfer the larger data stream for these pictures.
That sais, portable media will always be more about small footprints than highest quality (ex. - MP3 vs DVD-Audio).
say, H.264 anyone?
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Yeah, because compressing 1280 x "whatever" video is so much harder than standard NTSC. *cough drop every other line cough* seriously, people download 600 mb divx rips because the quality is "good enough", making a bigger, badder original file isn't going to change anything.
This is kind of a silly point to make. Compression ratios will always be ahead of broadcast standards. I download HD divx and xvid rips of tv shows all the time. You could debate that it's not true HD, but they look much better than my progressive scan DVD's.
Compression is here now. It won't last a few years. CD-R and DVD-R sized rips will appear just like they do now. Perhaps the larger file format will slow down compression a bit but it won't be a real deterrent.
He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats
He's obviously someone that just doesn't get it. He must of missed out on the whole MP3 thing. In his rant, he talks about how no one he's run into has ever uploaded or downloaded an HD movie from the net. He fails to ask, however, if anyone's ever uploaded or downloaded a movie that came from HDTV sources.
Sure, while bandwidth is low, people won't be downloading HDTV content, but once there's fiber to the door that will change.
There's an ISP in my area (Free) that I'm switching to when I change apartments in two months. They offer a combo TV/DSL package that's 5Mbps down normally, and 2Mbps down when you're watching TV. A friend has it, and he says you can't tell the difference. (This is on PAL, which has a higher resolution, but a slightly slower refresh rate than NTSC.)
If I can stream regular quality content at 3Mbps, by the time we get to 30Mbps and up to the home, this guy's entire premise will be destroyed. I hate to bust his bubble, but the media kiosk has been tried, and tried again. No one's been able to get it to work, and with good reason. There are no consumer electronics players that take a standard format external drive.
If we could see hard drives that fit the new slot based version of PCIe, this might change (assuming you could get disk-based players like PVRs that use those instead of an internal hard drive), then you could ramp into the market, by providing added functionality to those already in need of disk space (easy upgrades), and service after you had seeded the market.
if you're asking yourself that question, here's a partial answer:
He's the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. He's looks young, probably in his 30s or early 40s, has tons of money to his name, and is far from the typical millionaire/billionaire stereotype. He's not well liked by the upper NBA execs for frequent criticism of the referees, and has gotten himself fined on numerous occasions since taking ownership of the Mavs a few years ago. He once said he wouldnt trust one of them to operate a Dairy Queen (an ice cream shop in the US), to which DQ said come give it a try (Cuban did do a DQ Manager for a day). I dont think the guy has ever worn a suit in his life. He'll be hosting some reality-type TV show this fall that, from commercials, appears to be a knock off of The Apprentice.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
As someone who has worked in and observed the media industry for a while, I have to once again where a lot of these thoughts fall short
1) People like watching stuff on their television while sitting on their couch. I mean, it's great to talk about all sorts of computer tech being integrated into this and that but at the end of the day, I don't want my darn TV to bluescreen during the superbowl and i'm a heck of a lot more accepting and tolerant of this type of nonsense than most people are
2) Piracy is a massive issue and will continue to be so long as the studios follow the "ain't broke don't fix" attitude. The moment a tech window opens up, if media isn't delivered to the people in a reasonable format, people will make do. Ie., I won't pay $6 for a quality video on my PC, but if you can deliver me a watchable video on my PC right now for free, hrmmm....
3) There is a huge dilemma facing all the studios and tech companies as they contemplate the build out of structures to support these types of technologies. I hope Verizon picks up and does some crazy 30 mbps + connection, but at the end of the day, these things take YEARS and YEARS to recoup costs on and without sharing some of that cost with the studios (who benefit most from appropriately developed tech platforms), these rollouts will be MUCH slower than anticipated.
I thought security by obscurity was the weakest form of digital protection... now I know one worse: Security by Obesity.
Anyone want to rename some 2 year old DVD-SVCD code to the "fen-fen" algorithm?
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
...and marked "Cuban" on my DVDs. Now what? Do I wait for the next article for more instructions?
Is this some quest?
[sig]darkfus[/sig]
Does this mean I will be able to buy the whole season of Bikini Destinations in uncompressed HD quality?
"He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats."
Umm no.
1.) Bigger files can be shrunk down. See how an 8 gig DVD gets knocked down to 700 megs.
2.) This doesn't solve the problem of piracy. It's barely a hurdle. The solution to piracy is making money, not stopping it from happening. There are lots of ways to do that, most of them involve making the product better. I'm perfectly saavy when it comes to watching movies without paying for them. I don't. Why? Because I'm a good honest person? Nah. It's because going to the store and plunking down a few bucks is better than downloading it over a period of several days. Plus I like commentaries etc.
Don't close doors, open new ones.
"Derp de derp."
It doesn't matter if you release everyting in 1080p 90FPS DV files, all it takes is Discreet Media Cleaner and suddenly it's 480p at 30FPS MPEG2. Or VirtualDub with ffmpeg/xvid/theora or whatever.
It's the classic ratio of disk space versus processor power. The more processor power you have the less disk space you need (As you get better compression with compute-intensive algorithms)
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
or at least the sharing part..
They do make it easy to download the movies by giving out 3Mb/s, but they do hinder the sharing of the content by capping ups at 128Kb/s.
Sure, with the advent of distributed downloads, bit torrent, etc, the bandwidth hit itsn't that big, but its certainly become a hassle to share those 4.7 GB files if it takes you 8 hours to get it and 150 hours to share it.
While this person might be on to something (keep the file too large to be convienently pirated through digital means), it seems counterintiutive to the whole smaller-faster-better-cheaper paradigm that we usually ascribe to technology in general and computers specifically. Furthermore, you'd have to increase quality with that size, or the people will rebel against much larger material costs, not to mention the difficulty of putting such a movie on a removeable medium.
Basically, the idea is sound, but it probably won't fly without better storage mechanisms.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
The original content producer is the only one who can legally crank out billions of copies of his work.
So, flood the marketing channels, and make it so easy to buy his work that its not worth the trouble to make one for yourself.
Kinda like nails. Who would think of trying to make their own, despite any patent protection that might be involved in making nails?
For most things I buy, the people in the marketing channels have made damn sure its in my best interests to buy the product, even if I could make my own... as they have the tremendous advantage of economy of scale, that by the very laws of nature, I will never have.
In economics parlance, this is called a "natural monopoly", and does quite well, even without any intervention of rights protection groups.
We already have laws in place to go after anyone else trying to replicate oopyrighted works on such a scale to make the economics of mass production profitable.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
As a point of reference, raw SDTV is 270Mbps when sampling at 10 bits/sample.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
what will eventually limit people from downloading media is the free time they'll have to play/listen/watch it.
Basically, he's talking about a content distributer using hard drives instead of dvd's to send the content to a customer. Think of this another way - it is a network connection, much like ethernet, where packets of data get sent to customers.
The comments that I have read seem to be missing his main thrust - why keep to a static transport layer (dvd's) when instead you can have that layer improve in bandwidth as time goes on. While there are some issues with content control, I think he is completely right - dvd's are placing themselves out of the market cost at 20 bucks a pop. 2 years from now, why buy a 5 gb dvd for 20 bucks when you can buy a 20 gb usb keychain drive for the same? This is about flexibility and scalability, something that the current dvd (and the earlier vhs) distribution model do not have. This guy is a genius, and he's got the money to use his idea effectively.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
DVDs cost the industry less than a buck a pop. For the ammount of storage it's dirt cheap. They like it that way, it's like printing money, they're not gonna go for a small electronic gizmo that costs more to manufacture no matter how nifty it is. Ramp up time is important too, as is the time to burn during manufacturing. Have you seen a DVD getting made? It's *fast*, a system to make flashes then write to it would have to be way more parallel to make them in the volumes optical media are. Maybe it's doable but I've got a hunch that it's just more expensive than a stamped plastic sandwitch.
Which already is used to some extent. For some pirates, it's good enough. And given some of the theatre sizes and soundsystems in my town at least, it's comparable to the local movieplex. Since not everyone is going to blow 50 k$ on a home theatre, especially in the current economy, this bodes ill.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Didn't they try larger formats once before?(mmm, laser discs);)
Read the F'n Blog
His whole point is that compact flash drives and hard drive technology is booming right now. More storage in a smaller footprint for a cheaper price. It's far outpacing DVD (the media not the format). His point is that content delivery in the next couple years is going to hard drives (in some form) not to DVDs. At least, that's what he thinks...I agree with him.
As a SIDENOTE, he mentions the benefit of delivering "really big movies" on "really small hard drives" via mail or rental or whatever is that it's a natural deterrant to internet based file sharing. He thinks buying these really big movie files on really small hard drives will be more cost effective and less of a hassle than creating the infrastructure for a 10x (or 30x) faster internet. Again, over the next 5 years I think he's right.
It won't stop people from getting pirated content, and he doesn't claim that in his blog.
As others have already pointed out, filesize is no deterrent. For the people who don't care about pristine image quality, they will simply re-encode. The others will just wait a year for available bandwidth to catch up.
Since the purpose of copyright, as defined in the US constitution is, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and overbearing copyright enforcement is begining to have the opposite effect, perhaps it is time to start rethinking the incentive structure to get things back on track.
Short of a truly fascist global empire to enforce copyrights, the only true solution to piracy is to define it out of existence. Make unauthorized sharing legal, and both piracy and the oppressive and culturally taxing infrastructure to "fight" it go away.
That may sound crazy, but only if you've been indoctrinated by the current crop of copyright capitalists. Consider how everybody else in this world gets paid - they do a job, they get paid for the work. Why should producing ideas and information be any different? Why is it that such ephemeral products as ideas let the creaters work once but get paid over and over again?
Enter the idea of "work once, paid once." If we start paying the creators for the work and energy they put into creation and not copies of the creation itself, the whole "piracy" problem goes away. Did you like that last book by Stephen King? Then put $5 into an escrow account to be paid to King once his next book is released -- to the public domain. Did you like that last Jimi Hendrix album? Put $10 into an escrow account to pay Jimi once his next album is released -- to the public domain. (Jimi may be dead, but he still is making albums, just check amazon.)
This idea of escrowed release to the public domain lets artists get paid for their effort. It is no communist answer either - quality does get rewarded by greater pay. If an artist is very popular, he can set a higher escrow price for his next work. With a potential audience, or more directly - customer base, in the billions because of the internet, a really popular artist could easily charge tens of millions for his next work and get it.
On the flip-side, society is the relieved from all of the hassle and overhead associated with, "copyright enforcement." The public domain of ideas is again revitalized (ironically, the copyright industry's invocation of the tragedy of the commons effect with respect to the public domain is completely backwards, their locking down of property rights in the public domain has in effect forced it to go fallow -- the exact reverse of the way the tragedy of the commons works with real property).
So, a "work once, paid once" approach is a win-win for everyone -- except the current copyright industry who have a huge vested interest in the status quo. It is unfortunate that they are the ones calling the shots with congress today.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Here's in idea.
Let change the way movies/music/content is saved to a disk. Come up with some type of different kind of format, never before seen. Then only allow the CD/DVD readers to be installed in table top devices, where it can't be hookup to a computer at all. The normal Joe wouldn't be able to transfer the data over the internet.
Plain and simple copy protection doesn't work....
We need other means...
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
I wonder how long until the record and film industries resign themselves to the fact they will never stop piracy. Sure, they may put on a public front, but they will have to accept that it is now too imbedded in internet culture to stop. They can sue, but it's only a matter of time until a secure p2p network becomes the standard.
I have no sympathy for the record companies - they were far too slow off the blocks with paid-for downloads and have been fleecing consumers for years. I have different feelings about the film studios - apart from DVD region encoding, at least they're trying to give consumers better value for money with extras etc, and DVDs don't feel over-priced. Unfortunately for them, if their product is in a digital format, it will always get shared.
Lets say, I hypothetically download a movie to watch, and it takes all day to download this movie. It is made from someone sitting in a theater and filming it with Digital Camera in hand....but it was released the same day I am downloading it. Am I going to complain "Damn, the quality of this is poor....and I can hear whomever crunching popcorn in the background....and why is everyone laughing so loud at the screen?" OR am I going to happily watch a new release in the comfort of my PC chair / Home theater system and say "Wow, good movie...have to buy the DVD in 6 months when it gets released" or maybe "Boy...glad I did not waste money on that BOMB".
If I am going to take the time to download a movie (which in this day and age I can start the d/l and do something else for XX:XX time while it downloads) I am going to be savvy enough to realize compression was used....that its not the same experience as going into a theater, and the quality could be really bad...but at least I won't have to shell out $9.00, fight with the crowds of people, pay exhorbitant prices for popcorn just to watch a movie, AND I can take it wherever I go and watch it whenever I want to. I would be smart enough to realize the trade-off for convenience is compression (Which can result in GOOD quality and bad quality) and use, rather than worry about how the HiDef quality is degraded (hell, I would be watching it on a notebook, home PC, or maybe even a Big Screen if I wanted to burn a disc) and how big the file size is.
Compression has come a long way, and will continue to be used because IT WORKS 'good enough" for 90% of the population. Especially if the choice is Pay for real or D/L for FREE.
Heck, he used compression to copy movies to his Flash Drive and enjoyed it so much it sparked this whole essay and erroneous conclusion. Convenience will win over Quality. It has so far....and there are too many examples to site....You keep going until you die..."Me".
Is if the Dallas Mavericks can make it past the second round of the playoffs next season. Without Nash it could be a problem.
I'll tell you why the movie industry doesn't need to panic. There's value in a DVD. I've got no problem plopping down $20 - $25 for a DVD. I get a lot of value for the money. You've got the movie itself which is in a format that looks great on my big screen TV. You get the surround sound mix. You usually get a ton of extras. All in all, I think it's worth the money.
CD's on the other hand are a total rip off. You pay $12 - $18 bucks for about an hour of music, most of which is filler for the 1 - 4 good songs on the CD. There's very little value there and hence you've got more people who are willing to pirate music because they recognize they are being ripped off.
I don't think DVD piracy will ever be as much of a problem as music piracy because the movie industry generally provides some real value for the money that your spending.
The music industry should take a hint. Offer singles and albumns on the internet for people who don't want all of the frills (which is finally starting to happen). Produce a CD / DVD package for customers in the $20 - $25 dollar value range. The CD would, obviously containt he music. The DVD would contain all of the music mixed in surround sound, plus music videos and other extras like interviews with the band, etc. Something like that would be worth the money. Continue offering just the CD for those that don't want the extra's and price it in the $7 - $11 dollar range. CD sales would go up instantly.
I'd rather just get off my ass and ride a bike.
If noone clues ol' Mark in he might run off to the MPAA with the 'just make the movies a terabyte' business and maybe they'll leave technology the hell alone!
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
In his rant, he talks about how no one he's run into has ever uploaded or downloaded an HD movie from the net.
Considering that many of the TV episodes of various series I see online are HD material that's been recompressed with Divx or Xvid or some similar format, I wonder what people he's been talking to...
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Then we have to compress the movies to something that can be stored on our hard drives just to avoid the noise caused by HD-DVD drives overheating by trying to read all the data.
This is nothing new. There was a drop in PC-games piracy when CDROM's came, before CD-R drives where commonplace, because copying a full CD without something equally big was much bigger operation than just throwing the game to 20 floppies.. too bad it doesn't work with content that can be compressed with "good enough" lossy compression.
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
There have been a lot of posts so far about how dumb Mark Cuban is because he thinks the solution to piracy is to release content at extremely high bitrates. While it is true that you could transcode HD content to manageable bitrates, you would surely need to decimate the frame size to do so, and when you do that, you're not talking about HD any more. Sure you're still talking about piracy, but once you lose the high definition, Mr. Cuban doesn't worry about it anymore, since the concept of "low resolution" isn't vibrating on his wavelength.
The main thrust of this blog is talking about how the heck we're going to deliver HD to the home. I think it's laughable that he would consider delivering content on hard disks instead of DVDs... um let's see, the hard disk costs at least 500x to manufacture and is full of moving parts that are likely to fail the more the device is moved around. Oh, and it doesn't slip into a thin envelope like a DVD a la Netflix. Considering flash drives is at least technically feasible, but there, the manufacture cost multiple is even higher and it will be quite a number of years before we have something big enough for an HD TV show, let alone a movie.
DVDs (and optical media in general) are extremely cheap to manufacture, and very robust. They will last until something even cheaper and more robust comes along, or in the case of IP delivery, the convenience factor is good enough that you can charge the consumer enough to cover the transmission cost and still make a profit.
Mr. Cuban is foolish to discount VOD. There is no doubt in my mind that by the end of the decade, most people will get their media fix (even HDTV) the instant gratification way, pulling it off the network. Some companies are already providing VOD movies to the PC... see starz.com. PVR and US Postal Service (Netflix) are working as a stopgap until the bandwidth is in place. Nobody wants to piddle around with discs and drives when we can just push a button on our remote.
You mean, of course, movies and other content in HD format. There's no such thing as "HD content", any more than there's "paper content" for books.
It's possible to provide content in HD format, as well as in other formats.
what's more important, size or quality... answer: ask your girlfriend (hah!) everyone has their own opinion...
Made billions... Owns the Mavericks, two television stations (HDNet, and HDNet movies), and is a regular on AVS Forum.
When I saw him at CES two years ago, talking to his camera crew, because that's what he does, I listened to VPs from major companies just watch him talk and talk to each other about how he is the best thing that ever happened to their industry.
He has a FORTUNE. He likes HDTV. He bought a local station (so HDNet is available OTA in Dallas), hooked up with DirecTV, and when they had more bandwidth, rolled out HDNet Movies.
Unfortunately, not all of my HD tastes are the same as his, as HDNet is "whatever Cuban wants to watch."
This man made a fortune, and is singlehandedly pushing more HD Content than anyone else, because he likes it.
I'd say he's a good person to recognize.
Alex
To me the most interesting thing about this articale is the fact that when you give people a choice of a thousand movies, they will tend to get the more obscure things. I know I do. When I look for music on-line, It's not Britney, it's things that I don't hear on the radio or things that are not popular enough for record stores to carry. Same with Movies, I bought one of those 14.99 unlimited things at BlockBuster's and quickly ran thriough all of the new releases, I then found myself renting an obscent amount of foreign films and other things that I would normally waste the moeny one ( as if most new (Big Name) releases are a waste to being with).
I discovered MP3s in 1995. At the time I had a 486 50, a 2x CD-ROM, and no Internet connection. For me, it was basically just something cool to toy with. I've always been facinated with digital music, and this was just too cool. So I'd spend 15 minutes ripping a 5 minute song, because of all the drive jitter, then another 15 minutes or so to encode. Playback was pretty impractical since I couldn't do it in anything but DOS. The CPU overhead from any multitasking OS was enough that it couldn't playback without skipping. Transfering it would have been worthless too, given a 14.4 modem and only BBSes to use.
Well now I can rip a CD at about 12x or so, encoding takes only a few seconds per minute of playtime, and happens in the background. Playback is so minimal the impact is unnoticable. Also, I distribute soundtracks weighing in at 50-100mb online, and people download them all the time.
So in less than 10 years, compressed music went form something I toyed with only as a curisoity to something I can use without even thinking about it. I imaging it'll take even less time for that to happen with HD.
There is going to be a big, big war to host your content in your house. Whoever does it the best, provides the most flexibility, and expandability at the best price, will win.
The key term he uses here is FLEXIBILITY, which is something that Big Companies would prefer not to ever think about, particularly regarding stuff like DRM. Where flexibility is vital, DRM is basically treated as damage. People are going to copy, edit and transcode video for their different devices, operating systems and situations, and a format that prevents this is simply going to lose.
The only thing going for DRM-land is that they can restrict content to formats that makes transcoding difficult. In this situation, the user has to play by the company's rules, even if they suck totally. (I tend to look at this as "cheating", as it doesn't let the formats compete on merit, but format lock-ins are hardly news). Hacks and alternate players that get content out of lock-in land are vital here, as they level the playing field again.
Digital audio is interesting in that an open format (mp3) basically got out and won the day early, and DRM audio really didn't ever have a chance. Everyone can encode audio these days, and play it on every operating system, or their phone, or their CD walkman, or their car stereo head unit. It's a solved problem. The digital video war is still well and truly raging, with no clear open standard that everyone can use everywhere, from their Mac laptops to their Aibos. When it comes though, DRM formats are going to have a really hard time.
Most of the comments are about the p2p angle, which was hardly the point. The main point of the article was that the DVD format and storage size can only change on rare occassions, whereas flash and hard disk storage sizes are doubling every year. This contrast allows a more flexible business model than sellers of a traditional product like a DVD player can keep up with. Following, he sees a huge market for introducing hard and flash drives, things like vending machines for movies with usb ports.
Here in Denmark, a boxed DVD is about 30-40 USD. Thats just way too much, for a product that in most cases has already made a lot of revenue through theaters, merchandise and such.
Bring the price down to around 10-15 bucks, and ill purchase more. And dont give me that crap about "extras" on the DVD. Only die-hard Tom Cruise fans (or people who thought the titles of the extras sounded cool, like me, doh) would actually pay for the extras included on the Last Samurai DVD.
Same goes for music. Ill happily pay for whatever drug habit the artists has, but im cutting the line (no pun intended) when it comes to the PHB types.
I have a question I always ask at speeches, and have asked for the last several years. I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand.
I don't think many people would admit {up,down}loading movies off the net, since it's an illegal activity under the DMCA and alike crap.
Score: i, Imaginary
I dont think this will solve anything...Im not sure what will or if anything will. But i do know one thing ever since i got satalite radio "sirius" i havent downloaded a single illegal song. maybe something like that is what we need for movies etc..you will always have your cheap asses that might as well get shipped to an island with all the others...i guess but who knows just some thoughts..the quality of the film is worth going to the show..not to mention those people bitch about it being expensive steal and in turn make the prices more to compensate for lost sales...
Requantization != recompression.
Requantization requires that the input and output video are of the same resolution and framerate. (Requant operates at the stream level, on data that has already been DCTed and does not touch the motion vectors at all.)
Requant works well for DVDShrink because you rarely shrink a DVD (after stripping out extra features, etc.) to less than 80% or so of its original size.
To go from 8+ GB/hour (typical ATSC HD bitrate) down to only 2 GB/hour or so will make MPEG-2 video unwatchable unless you reduce the resolution. Which requires a full re-encode rather than simply requantization. (You MIGHT be able to take a shortcut by reusing the motion vectors, but that's about it.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Hey let's not forget about MPEG4. The current implementations JUST take care of the "Advanced Simple profile". We have yet to see features such as B-frames (not available on AVIs), sprites (irregular shapes which move over background layers), texture mapping, and other things that haven't been implemented... YET.
Maybe in 10 years we'll come up with audio compression algorithms which could separate an actors' voice from the background music, and then sample the instruments from it and be able to store the notes as discrete data. (Something like MIDI on Steroids). Or maybe just sample the actors' voice pitch, and store his dialogues in some kind of speech format.
Oh. And regarding physical media, don't forget about nanotechnology and atomic-sized storage.people DO download High Def video files for use on their home computer. sure... it may take a while, but a lot of people I know virtually spend a lot of bandwidth and hard drive space to download the HD quality rips of films and TV shows. Combined with the recent work of verizon, which may take a few years to complete none the less, we're all eventually going to have fiber to the door. and if you compare the advance of TV's vs. the advances of computers, the computer, assuming it stays seperate from the role of TV, will have massive storage, matched with massive bandwidth. I REALLY hope that the media industry can move to a system that takes advantage of the technology, instead of trying to limit it, or work around it.
He's got a good idea with the physical distribution of memory sticks for media, mostly in my opinion, that you can pack them better then DVD's to keep them from being broken. but other wise, we're very quickly moving to a ubiquitous(sp?) networked environment, where people either with the right knowledge, or all of us with hope, can dump the concept of physical mediums for distribution methods. I just hope they let me make back ups, cause god knows window's is never going to be full proof enough to keep my data after it BSOD's on me.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I already know some Anime fans that exchange removable HDs to share movies. And I'm sure the day is fast approaching when they will shell out for flash/pen drives. It can be an easy way to share data, but I'm not seeing how it prevents or reduces piracy.
For that, I'd think you'd want some kind of hardware hack like the cartridges that the old game systems (and C64) used to use. Still hackable, but much more of a PITA.
This guy is NOT stupid or clueless. He sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for cold hard cash and became a billionaire in the process. He is STILL a billionaire. How many other dot commers can claim that?
He does what he wants. He has a passion for basketball so he bought the Dallas Mavericks. He takes care of his players (they have an awesome arena to play in that is decked out in technology to include individual DVD players in the locker rooms for each player). He doesn't take crap off the refs or the NBA, and has been fined enough to show it. I respect him for that. He doesn't whine about it.
While we can nit all day long about what he said in his blog, the upshot is that storage media and capacity are in a high rate of change right now. He is not advocating the status quo, but doing something different. That is his trademark. Discount him at your peril.
The funky bunch over at HD Net are forward thinking which is good but as an owner of a high definition home theater PC as well as an ardent Laker fan here's my take: I push the source button on my remote control. Windows XP appears at a resolution of 1280X720 in widescreen format. At the top of the screen is a list of my 15 favorite movies. I grab my wireless keyboard/mouse and click on "Days of Thunder" it plays and my buddies rejoice at the marvel of technology in my living room. I watch movies in High Definition on TNT-HD all the time and it does look better than on DVD but there is the "good enough" factor that I think they're overlooking.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
...though the visible result may be indistinguisable. When a product has no inherent scarcity value, you'd better hope economies are good and people generous. It'd certainly be easier to teach kids about respecting artists with fewer documented instances of artists being shat upon by lawyers.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
I was going to mention the whole re-encode to a lower filesize myself. Though, someone had said just re-encode to a lower quality. There is a problem with that assumption. Just because a video file is "smaller" than another video file doesn't mean the quality is worse. The two main factors are (1) the type of compression used - i.e., divx 3.11, 5.1, xvid, wmv, etc; and (2) the skills of the encoder - yes it's possible to make an xvid encode which looks like crap if you screw up the settings. So larger filesizes solves nothing.
Oh, and I thought I'd point something else out. There is all this fuss about the MPAA and piracy. Give me a break. The survey the did survied people using the internet... WOW, let's start off the survey biased to begin with. Why not survey people in a MALL or in the PUBLIC. Surveying people on the internet is a HUGE bias since quite a few internet savey people who are willing to take the time to do the survey likely download movies online. But this tells us nothing about the sampling of "MOVIEGOERS" who download movies, it simply tells us how many INTERNET-MOVIEGOERS download movies online.
Second in regards to the piracy issue, no.. who cares really. 99% of the movies out now suck ass anyway, and I just got my x800xt in the mail. I have more important things to do than type crap on slashdot.
"While I don't agree with the grandparent post about going against the system, I do think something is wrong if and when it is the big corporations that are "making" new and changing existing laws. (lobbying/bribing etc.)"
That's what happens when you have absentee landlords. A citizentry that wants the benefits that come with being a citizen. But doesn't want to put the effort into the upkeep. Results are all around you. Social slums, and a system that increasingly fails to respond to "turn, turn, turn. Iceberg ahead"
"I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand."
That's because they're not downloading HD off a p2p network, they're using alt.binaries.hdtv on usenet.
Convenience will win over Quality.
Ugh. You can keep your crappy video with downmixed sound and artifacting in the blacks. It's very sad that some poeple think that enjoying a movie is just about saying they watched it; you're line of thinking is practically just an extension of the warez kids who are all about quantity, not quality.
The "comfort" of your chair in front of your PC? I don't care how comfortable it is, my couch is better. Any couch. Do you not realize that half the experience of watching a movie is putting aside some time, sitting down, turning down the lights, and getting absorbed into a good story? Do you read lots of books and not pay attention to the nuances of the sentence structure, but instead read to say "look how many books I've read!"? A handheld shot will never portray the reasons I watch movies properly; cinematography, sound mixes, with emotions and characterizations that are properly portrayed through subtleties.
Convenience MAY win over quality, but the sacrifices you intend to make to just see a flick are far too great, so much so that they end up degrading the movie. I definitely think Mark Cuban reached a set of wrong conclusions, but you've also taken it far to the extreme, on the other side. Downloading movies is not as popular as people play it out to be, especially when DVDs are fairly cheap, have no learning curve, and do not take effort in playing on your TV. Why do you think the format has been so succesful? When I can download such things as a copy of "Contempt" by Goddard in less time than it takes to go to the store and pull it up on my HDTV projector, you will see downloads going through the roof.
Then again, maybe your idea of movies to see are limited to "xXx" and whatever mindless $$-machine comes out of Hollywood... it is ironic that you mention that you hate running the risk of paying for something you might hate. Do you know what caveat emptor is?
"Exactly! Also, people WANT to be able to do this...so the computer companies will be driven by that DESIGN goal. "
The people in question wanting all this are geeks. Remember Ma and Pa Kettle from all those previous "Linux is ready..." and "All you need is..." or "Office has unneeded bloat..." Slashdot stories?
They're still comfortable with their five-year old computers, running their previous versions of software. Trying to make it in a world were the Middle class is no longer what it use to be.
"Firstly compression would always yield some content at current formats even if the source was larger. "
Correct. Now if compression is as acceptable as everyone using your argument thinks? Then one needs to ask, why are movie companies even bothering producing DVDs? Release everything on CDs. Cheaper, and obviously acceptable to the non-buying public.
God knows why anyone is asking Mark Cuban about anything.
----
On another note, ever notice really good stories can stick out in your mind indepedant of what medium they were. I mean really good stories that stick with you. They could be a novel, a play, movie -whatever. Building a network entirely around HD content is stupid. Sure, when color tv's were brand spanking new people would watch for the novelty. But I kind of doubt building a network around a new tv standard will fly. The media isn't the message - never was. "The message is the message".
I remember distinctly seeing Mark Cuban saying "In a way the whole Kobe trial could be good for the NBA". And then deny it a day later, then two days later apologize.
Tard, tardy, tardest.
This guy is a waste of flesh.
The right for humans to consume culture must always overweigh the right to make a profit.
Do you know what READING is? And how far it is away from UNDERSTANDING what you have read?
You keep going until you die..."Me".
And the tickets generally run around $5-$8 where I live, which is is not enough to make even consider the price as a major decision-making factor.
The biggest down-side to the theatre is just the time comittment. I can't press pause like I can on TiVo/DVD and get up to start another load of laundry in the washer/drier and then come back and press play. I can't check my email. It's about 2.5 hours of time wasted on entertainment and nothing else. If you're on a date, its even more awkward to try to cuddle than at home. Those theatre chairs are quite restrictive, and the people behind you will complain of your girlfriend sits on your lap.
Mathematics is not a crime.
check out www.pdbox.co.kr or any other korean broad cast websites like www.kbs.co.kr www.sbs.co.kr www.mbc.co.kr You pay a small amount of money (~$1-2) and then you can see a stream of movies on a PC. Some offer screen resolutions that seems equal to DVD's (about 640x480)
There are very few movies which I consider as valuable as a quality CD. Maybe if movies were half the price of CDs I'd buy them, but in general a movie is good for 1.5-2 hours of enjoyment, or in exceptional cases maybe I can watch it 3-5 times and get up to 10 hours of enjoyment out of it. Compare to a CD, which can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment.
This isn't to say that there isn't a lot of music being produced that is a ripoff at $12-$18 per CD, because there is. But for some good music, that often took a year or so of the artist's time to write and record, it's not a bad price at all. Especially with lesser-known artists, who might be extremely lucky if they sell 5,000 copies of their CD, the $12-$18 isn't really enough to even support them without a day job.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
- Hard drives are hard (oh a pun, will you hold that against me?)
- DVDs are not
- Downloading is hard (try and ask any non computer person if they can figure out how to download a movie in less time than it takes them to purchase/rent a DVD and start watching it)
Hence, when downloading becomes easy and fast, people will do it in huge amounts. Will they be ok with the compression? Once again, if it's easy to download and watch on a TV, sure. If not, hell no. HOWEVER, there is a point at which quality finally trumps quantity. I can toss a huge library encoded at 24kbps onto an iPod, but do I want to listen to that? There is a certain threshold that even consumers won't cross.Nope, his methods won't stop piracy or even slow it down. I said that in my original post. But to believe that people will accept horrible compression with severe audio and video artifacting is ludicrous, especially in its current state. Someone may know a downloaded movie is crap compared to the original, but as it stands, the people that do that don't care. Lower the ease of entry into grabbing free, crappy looking movies, and we'll see exactly where that threshold lies.
Oh and one more thing: if you think "xXx" is an insinuation of pr0n, you are the one that needs a reading comprehension class. If not, ignore this paragraph.
This is an excellent solution. In fact it just gave me a brilliant idea! Since blades are a security risk at airports, lets only make it an industry standard to only make really really really big blades that are too big for terrorists to carry and easy to detect.
Rich or not, this guy is a twit.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Did you guys forget Mark Cuban owns HDNet? Of course a transition to HD is going to benefit him.
In the future, when moving "massive" amounts of data will become obscenely easy, P2P network bandwidth will not be the only path to widespread piracy. If (when) cheap 10-terabyte wallet sized media devices become the norm, individuals will no longer pass around movies--they will pass around libraries. At 5 gigs (generous indeed) per movie a media device of that size could store 2,000 movies. This method of passing would enable a very few transactions to spread movies effeciently--thus eliminating the NECESSITY for p2p networks (although not eliminating their existence). Even the low granularity of passing data person to person will begin to reach market saturation in smaller and smaller amounts of time. If P2P bandwidth remains the same (it won't) and people begin to demand HD video, the piracy channels will be able to satiate their desire.
Taxing beyond the apex of the Laffer Curve is oppression.
Have you seen a DVD getting made? It's *fast*
Those are approximate speeds. Do the same 1001-1002-1003 as when driving. That's FAST.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Standard 2CD rip: 640x???, ~900mb video, 400mb AC3 soundtrack.
HDTV: 1920x(3x???), for a total of 9x the pixels. 9x900mb video + 400mb AC3 = 1 DVD+R DL.
And with no resizing, you're looking at a better rip than most DVD rips already (which are typically downsized from 720x??? to 640x???)
And that is certainly "doable" today, for "powerusers" soon, and for "common people" in not so many years.
Their biggest "advantage" today is that the $$$/bandwidth ratio is so much bigger for music. It is far more profitable to pirate music and buy the DVD than the other way around, assuming you're not on a fat connection (which usually costs money too, college students need not reply...)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And how exactly do you prevent somebody from building their own 'rental' library for all of this transferrable content? Now you've got one copy of a movie in circulation being 'rented' out to hundreds or thousands of individuals.
that's what public libraries are for.
+&x
Lets say, I hypothetically download a movie to watch, and it takes all day to download this movie. It is made from someone sitting in a theater and filming it with Digital Camera in hand....but it was released the same day I am downloading it. Am I going to complain "Damn, the quality of this is poor....and I can hear whomever crunching popcorn in the background....and why is everyone laughing so loud at the screen?"
Nothing hypothetical about it. I found a camrip of the third Matrix movie on a buddy's semi-private SFTP site, and it was full of audience "participation". Sadly, it was all justifiable, and enhanced the experience by showing that everyone who paid to see it thought it was sucking too. I watched the entire rip, but I think i would have been at the box office midway through demanding my money had I paid to see it. It got better, but I wouldn't have known that at the time.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
While the bandwidth used by the broadcast feed will be increased as the quality of the image improves, the limit is what people can use to render the image.
I.E. If you have a regular high definition tv, that is the best image you will be able to see.
You also run into diminishing returns. MP3 is not the quality of a wav file. However, the difference is small and most people are willing to get a little less quality for the convenience of the small file size.
Digital TV Reviews
Laugh at my ignorance while I learn Rails - a Real ne
Dear M.C. , I guess you do not thinker a lot these days...
I work in a service firm specialized in compressing satellite trasmissions for mobile operators. We routinely squeeze DVB-S and DVB-T MPEG2s to 3GPP MPEG-4 files. (translated; I can squeeze an entire DVD into 128 megabytes in real time) It gets even better if you do a direct DV25(used in the studios) to Xvid or DIvx (both variants of the MPEG4) as you do not loose any of the chroma qualities of the original recording, which most HW MPEG2 boards routinedly mangle.
When we pack the stuff for our customers we use both H264 and a more "exotic" and costly proprietary wavelet codecs and with that you can squeeze a S-VHS quality program in a 128 MB SD card or a DVD in a 256MB SD. Just by removing some of the B frames (used for indexing) you can put the DVD in a 128 MB card.
I see no probs in squeezing any HDTV into a DVD with either of these "offthe shelf" techniques.
I also am working on a prototype which will use the Matroska container with either the Theora or the very good Rududu wavelet codecs (which I hope will someday be open sourced), and I can guarantee you'll be surprised how good that is in comparison.
I have been looking at the ON2 (bless them for the Theora VP3 donation !) VP6 codec (used in the WinampTV ) and it looks way beyond either the MPEG2, H264 or any other commercial stuff so far, I have personally tested 1024 mbs broadcasts which look incredibly better than a DVD, and this streaming on HTTP, which is much better than you can imagine (the bundles of video frames can get cached by the internet and buffer much better than even a real good RTP/RTSP setup like Real or VLC. Now, just cross this with a Bittorrent mod and, voila' the regulat public has access to MAKING YOU OWN HDTV station out of open souce and running on completely distributed P2P architetcure.
Say Good Bye to the folks Hollywood...