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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.
...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
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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".
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).
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.
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?
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.