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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.
"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 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
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.