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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'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.
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 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.
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
What's wrong with DVD's? I mean compressing am HD movie down to DVD size isn't going to hurt your quality that bad. It's not like taking a DVD and making it a VCD. The quality is great and you'll be able to play it back on your DVD player. And I don't know about you guys, but a 2CD xvid rip looks great on my TV with my computers TV out. So no problem there.
I don't think anything can stop piracy in this digital age short of goverment monitoring all our traffic, big brother style. And with encryption this is probably not going to stop piracy.
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...
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.
I was wondering if anyone else would spot this. He's right in that they can provide content in formats that are impractical to transfer over the net, for at least the next few years. Yes, bandwidth costs are plummeting, but not as fast as mass storage costs are, and delivering high quality content on mass storage seems like a feasible option. But there's nothing stopping anyone from encoding high quality content down to lower quality formats and distributing those instead.
The real kicker here, is that the public don't care about quality. Yes, I care. Others do, too. But the general public don't. I work with people that are quite happy to watch movies they've downloaded with really visible compression artifacts rather than buy the DVD. But DVD quality is deemed good enough for most, and it's already feasible to download a DVD. So what if the content is available in higher quality formats. I'll buy it. But the mass market won't, when it's available for free at DVD quality. And without support from the mass market, illegal copying becomes a real problem for content providers.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
"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."
The key word here is "should". I agree, if you put out a high quality product, a DVD with lots of cool features, great video and audio quality, and, above all, a movie that is good enough that people are willing to buy it, then piracy wouldn't be that big of an issue. But try telling this to the MPAA...
You won't hate yourself in the morning if you don't get up before noon.
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.
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.
I call BS. Some people may have shared bandwidth of 20-30mbit, but it is far from being generally available. Go ahead and spin up every household downloading HDTV streams at 15mbit each and then calculate the bandwidth needed in the network. That's easily 10 years away for 90% of Americans.
That's why you build distributed redundancy in a network. The bandwidth potential of a single fiber is so astonishing that it is not particulary difficult to distribute demand HD service.
This type of distribution already exists in test markets, and the technology works. It only took a few years to get cable modem adoption widespread (and this was right at the transition from a lot of mom and pop operators merging into TW/Cox (ie it was not the ideal time for a technology rollout)). There is no reason to believe that FtoP is more than a couple years away.
As for me and mine, we are still struggling to lure our first broadband provider into the neighborhood -- if we succeed we get to look forward to $49/month for 384 kbps.
Where are you located? The unfortunate fact is, once you get outside about 30 miles from a medium sized city your chances of broadband service plummet. This is one of the prices Americans pay for fully privatized and mostly unregulated industry. Many localities would not have decent electricity if the industry wasn't tightly regulated. There just aren't enough people to justify the higher cost of deployment and maintenance in rural areas.
You're right, you may never get good broadband, even in 10 years, but it has nothing to do with the tech.
I realize that everybody knows increasing file sizes only buys you so much time, but there's another much more important reason why this is a terrible idea.
CPU processing "power", which could be represented for the purposes of this situation as instructions per second, is increasing exponentially over time at a rate of approximately 25-50% per year. Note that this is not as fast as Moore's Law, because that applies to the number of transistors per chip, not instructions per second.
Telecommunications, on the other hand, has been increasing in bandwidth at a much faster rate. Very roughly, we're talking about an increase in consumer download capability from 14 kbps to 1Mbps or more for the target market, all in the last 12 years. That comes out to an average exponential growth of 71% per year. And core routing capabilities are growing probably even faster than that, but let's not go there.
Now, if we assume that the amount of computation for video is roughly proportional to the data size, your ability to "bloat" the video stream with more pixels is bounded NOT by your Internet bandwidth, but by your computational limits.
Thus, the point of this argument is, even if you stress the user's computer to its limit when playing video, the stress level on the user's Internet connection will keep falling at 20-45% per year. The user will find it progressively easier to get videos through downloading, and there is NOTHING companies can do to stop it.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that would really be a problem. No more than BlockBuster is now. You may have the reansferable ownership rights, but you still don't have the right to make copies, nor do the people renting onw the movie at the end of the day. There is alos a time factor, that says it takes me x number of hours to watch thins and download, and while that's happening, no one else can use it. The fact that RentOne resnt backhows doesn't maen that they are killing Catapiller.
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
"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.