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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."
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.
The problem is that 30% of users are still stuck on dial-up modems. Even as file size increases, bandwidth increases more slower.
It's a question of money, really. Who can roll out the wires the fastest to the most people?
Until cable companies are prepared to tackle the last-mile problem, I daresay we won't see any significant progress for a while.
My current 160gb SATA drives work out at 60c/gb (not the cheapest, I paid extra for higher performance) 25c for the cheapest drives next year doesn't seem too far wrong at all.
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.
What, we already have service in the 20-30mbit range. ...in Japan. Outside of Tokyo or Seoul I don't know of many places with that kind of bandwidth. My friend still uses 56k and I use a 1.5 Mbit cable modem. Back in 2000 I had a 7.1 Mbit ADSL line. Also, remember that for p2p content distribution the UL bandwidth is more important than the DL bandwidth. UL bandwidth hasn't progressed much at all.
The fact is that changes in broadband bandwidth are far more dependant on economics than on technology. If the large monopolistic communication corps don't think faster speeds for p2p will increase their bottom line, it just won't happen. In fact many ISPs are intentionally blocking all p2p ports that they can find. So I'm not so sure things are progressing the way you think they are, but it is nice to be young... Warp drive is only a few years away.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
No.
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