Slashdot Mirror
Three Minutes With Mark Cuban
Thomas Hawk writes "Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavericks, HDNET, blogger extraordinaire and all around tech visionary really, really gets it. Read on for his views on Media Center, content delivery via hard drive instead of DVD, movie conversions to HD, Home entertainment, etc."
http://www.blogmaverick.com/
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
I love the fact that his channel broadcasts all movies in their original aspect ratio with 5.1-channel sound. And this part made me laugh:
"We have a show called HDNet World Report where we put cameras in all kinds of hot spots--Iraq, wherever. And when we show a firefight or some sort of bombing, we don't have the reporter say anything. They just say, "We're in Iraq, we're in Baghdad, and there's a firefight going on, I'll shut up and let you watch it." And being able to see it in wide-screen high resolution with 5.1 sound, if you have a tank firing, you hear it coming out of one ear and see it leaving out of the other ear. It's just incredible. Just to be able to see it like you're actually sitting there is amazing."
you're damn right mark cuban gets it... he's single and a billionaire. he gets it from 2 or 3 girls at once. he's probably getting it right now
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It's nice to know what some "imporant" guy thinks, but what about the real people not on company payrolls?
There's no place like localhost
dupe goes here...
"I can be sitting in the bathroom with my Sidekick, and I'll be reading e-mail."
Thanks Mark, that's just a little more information than I needed.
Its a good idea. I've been offloading pr0n to my 90M bernoulli disks for years now. No, really.
I think hes gonna do a some Benefactor TV show, its kinda like that show Trump did...I can't remember the name. kinda dumb
The same respect I'd give someone who got rich by playing the lottery.
Come on. The guy got lucky -- that's it, that's all, baby goes to sleep. He's rich due to artificial market inflation combined with "right place, right time". He doesn't have any particular genius or insight to be interested in, just money he stumbled into. I'm about as interested in his opinions and views and upcoming products, as I am in Paris Hilton's. They're on the same conceptual level.
Well, I'm not ready to just give my stamp of approval to everything this guy has to say, but it's nice to see someone providing content for the technologies he wants to push.
I'm trying to think of a nice metaphorical example, but I think it's simplest to just point out the number of video games with similar hardware requirements and drastically different levels of performance. Or maybe a certain operating system owned by a certain billionaire who has programmers spend a lot of time on a candy-coating but no time optimizing that candy coating and, god forbid, giving us a (to borrow the movie equivalent) sequel instead of a remake.
In short, having sweet technology is cool. But it's even cooler when guys like this give it some content that challenges the specs.
Want a free computer?
He's getting a lot of attention because he was able to persuade a bunch of dumb investors that broadcast.com was going to make oodles of cash. That doesn't seem to have panned out, but he got out from under that failure before it was recognized as such.
He's full of crap. In this article he's talking about how Hard Drives are a better content distribution medium than optical discs. Uhhh... I guess when you're a billionaire you forget to check into the per-unit costs of things after a while.
Hard drives are far more efficient and more capable of storing future content than HD-DVD or Blu-ray
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
This raises all sorts of interesting questions.
Since folks like Netflix and Walmart have to buy the copies of the movies they rent out, the movies that are distributed via hard disks will need to be licensed copies as well. I wonder how the owners of the rights will keep track of the copies that are put on the hard disks - especially since the intention is to reuse the media.
The mode of distribution is not also as simple as the Netflix mechanism. Sending hard drives by mail cannot be as easy or cost effective as sending CDs by mail.
Some of what he says does sound futuristic - it may well become feasible in the future, but would it be possible now?
-- Off to build a bridge between the twin peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
If a fan tells me to trade a player or pick up a player, I can't always do what they say
I wonder how often he does do what they say? Better yet, if someone spammed a request for a trade to him, would he be statistically obligated to do what the spam told him to?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
C'mon many people are visionaries and "get it", just most don't have the bucks and arrogance to fill the media with their views.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This guy is way, way to excited about war. Mayybe he should enlist.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
Well, at least he's tech-savvy.
If you can't tell already this is like the 4th article on slashdot about Mark Cuban. His cash has already invaded the slashdot space.
Don't piss him off or he'll pay the modders to put you at "-5 troll for eternity."
This guy is all about TV. High definition. Content delivered on hard drives. 100-megabit internet connections at home. Nothing he said was that radical, or that interesting.
.com boom.
People listen to him because he got rich selling his company to Yahoo during the
He got rich, and now people think he has some sort of unique insight. I think he just got lucky with the timing.
I am not against his company, or his use of technology. But I am worried about the commodification of everything, including the battle field 'experience,' which has now been reduced officially to being, like, incredible and amazing. I guess it is, when you command a home theatre.
cheers, potor
I've never heard of anyone being fined by the ACM or IEEE.
-snip-
Whereas with our news, we have a show called HDNet World Report where we put cameras in all kinds of hot spots--Iraq, wherever. And when we show a firefight or some sort of bombing, we don't have the reporter say anything. They just say, "We're in Iraq, we're in Baghdad, and there's a firefight going on, I'll shut up and let you watch it." And being able to see it in wide-screen high resolution with 5.1 sound, if you have a tank firing, you hear it coming out of one ear and see it leaving out of the other ear. It's just incredible. Just to be able to see it like you're actually sitting there is amazing.
Hmmm...technically wouldn't this require a full spectrum of microphones set up around not only the tank, but the whole city?
I loves me some waffles!
If your only exposure to the guy is through news reports he may come off as a little arrogant, but damn: read the blog.
He's got a lot to back up that confidence, really insightful on a lot of things, and yet not afraid to admit where he's clueless.
Impressive dude.
~G
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
nad mod grandparent down.
my pet machine
This guy is full of himself. He found a cow and is milking it. He has no new ideas, and in the end wants to make money. All his ideas lacked some sort of technical / interesting point. As said before he is nothing new. So he made a shit load of money, but that doesn't make him interesting. He is selling a concept that people are willing to buy. That is great but another interesting is that this guys is full of hot air.
But if he has an idea I think all of you slashdot readers should start taking this idea up and check it out.
Man hard drives vs. optical discs.... what is he thinking.
-A0
Cuban is an asshole. Living in Dallas, we get fed his crap on a regular basis. Congratulations on selling Yahoo a company that never made a profit in it's entire existence. Take your money and STFU. By the way this is a repost.
He was on some interview on TV awhile ago, he's always getting fined by the NBA for arguing with the refs, and shouting vugarities. Smart man though, he set up the selling of his Yahoo stock with a hedging strategy, so Yahoo could be doing good or bad and he would still be okay. He's a smart man to say the least or atleast he made smart choices.
Mark Cuban was in charge of sales at broadcast.com. Todd Wagner, his partner, was the tech visionary. You don't hear about Todd Wagner because he doesn't need to tell everyone how great he is in order to feel good about himself.
The only reason this guy is a billionaire is because Yahoo, at the height of the dot-com bubble, was stupid enough to spend billions on a his company (broadcast.com). For those of you unfamiliar with broadcast.com, it was an amateurish looking site that hosted a bunch of amateurish audio and video content.
Essentially, Yahoo paid billions for a room full of servers hosting a bunch of low res video and a some crappy audio. I think they had some dreams of charging a subscription fee for that crap, but that never panned out (surprise, surprise).
The fact that this guy is respected as some kind of a shrewd entrepreneur is a joke.
The parent poster said that this guy Cuban " really, really gets it". Gets what? What was so insightful in his interview comments? I read the whole thing, and didn't find a single insightful word. Maybe I missed it.
If the exact same content is covered, that seems awfully dupe-like to me.
So you think it's only a dupe if the exact same article is linked? I'd hate to see your vision of a technically-speaking dupe-free slashdot, with a main page story for each major media news outlets coverage of the same information...
and is a ex-hoosier to boot :)
Hold on, is he a 'blogger extraordinaire' or does he 'really, really get it'? Can't be both...
Am I the only one who thinks about Ray Bradbury's book Farenheit 451.
I have suddenly a frightning vision of a future full of brain washed couch potatoe that prefer whatching thing on their TV-wall (buy 3 walls, the fourt to make the room complete is oferred free) because it looks much more realistic than the real life.
TV-Zombies that admires how much their TV is immersive, how well their ultra-high definition 4096p TV enable to see even the small dropplets of blood from the guy getting his head cut in the background, and how realistic the sound of the machine gun in Surround 16.1.
BUT no one turns his/her brain ON to realise that there watching an horrible war and actual people dying.
COMMON YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT BEING KILLED.
I'm sure there's a conspiracy behind HDTV : governement wanting people to be leniant and just admiring the quality of news in HDTV instead of thinking of the implication of said news.
{
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It was smart for Mark Cuban to choose to hedge in this case, but the brains behind setting up the hedge resided at an investment bank.
Hedges of this type are set up by investment banks like Goldman or UBS. They have people who sell these kind of services to executives. I imagine that someone like this connected with Cuban. For a substantial fee they set up the hedge. The goal of the investment bank is to lay off the risk, by selling options, or a moving set of dynamically hedged options so that they keep the fee and have no risk.
As noted in the parent, the hedge limits the "down side" loss, while also limiting the "upside" gain. This would not have been such a good move for Google insiders, but it was a very good move for Yahoo insiders.
Mark Cuban is following the curve of all self annointed internet 'visionaries' which is to first get a really good idea out there, sell it to someone with lots of money and then move into media and television because it suddenly dawns on them that their brilliance is best transfered to mass media where the real money is.
----
Yeah, gee that's exactly what we all need. 84 inches of Hi-Def death and dismemberment. Death gurgles in Dolby Digital 5.1.
Wow.
I really look forward to more of Mark Cuban's predictions.
Here's one from an anonymous coward based in Dallas:
Really, if you know anything about this guy you could care less about his viewpoints on anything, including technology.
Just one example - this is the same guy who threatened (over a taped phone conversation later played on radio) to 'cut the balls off' of an editor of a local Dallas magazine, simply because they wrote an article about his then-fiancee...a relatively lightweight, 'get to know her' type of social article. Who cares if he's rich - he's an idiot.
Why bother? DVD-sized media with more capacity are coming, and compression good enough for HDTV on existing media is already available.
Besides, hard disk replication would be a pain. We'd be back to where things were in the early days of VHS replication. Huge farms of consumer grade VCRs slaved off one good digital tape player. A bunch of people running around changing media. (Later, better ways to duplicate tape were developed.) CD/DVD replication is a high-volume process that's incredibly cheap in volume.
I've worked with Mark Cuban and I can tell you that he's a real visionary... when it comes to making money.
He starts companies in a shed, creates a lot of hype, sells the company for a couple of millions, and moves away before the poor sod that bought it realises the amazing "TV network" he bought actually consists of three Macs with outdated video capture cards and some VTRs so old they're held together with duct tape.
Great businessman, but not someone who I'd trust to give me an unbiased vision of the future - he's going to tell you whatever makes his current company seem more valuable.
I'm a big a fan of Mark Cuban as anyone, but the truth is more important. HD-Net is not the first channel to broadcast exclusively in HD, and Mark isn't even the first to broadcast more than one channel of HD at the same time.
Unity Motion was the first, a dedicated HD-only satellite system featuring three 24 hour, 1080i channels. In 1998. Dead by 1999. But I still have one of the receivers.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
I would have to say Mr. Cuban is more of a businessman than anything...what kind of tech enthusiast brags about his new HP Media Center PC? And why all the redundant backups on easily damaged hard drives full of precision moving parts? Seems pretty silly to me. This article is the usual from PC World - profit-driven filler. I'm surprised the article doesn't have more links to buy the stuff plugged in the text. Maybe I'm just being an elitist? -K
The words are "come on." Two words.
The word "common" means frequent or mundane.
Please people, there's such a thing as grammar stickling but there's also such a thing as learning to use the goddamn language. Seems like I see this "common" one every other day now.
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
I don't see how mark Cuban thinks his stations are worth paying for. The other HD channels do not charge. Hell, even HBO throws in the HD channels with your regular subscription.
Tonight HDNet was covering the Republican Convention. So was INHD. The difference? I don't have to pay extra for INHD.
You people that believe that he's a visionary can keep giving him your money.
'Wasn't there a slashdot topic on how he claimed that larger file sizes were the cure for video "piracy"?'
Yeah, and the retarded part about this is, there's no "must have" added value to the larger file size. Sure it'll be better quality, but as it is, using current compression, video files of a reasonable size look pretty damn good on hidef tvs. He seems to be advocating files MUCH larger than that, and thats just idiocy. Pirates will reencode at a lower res, and you're back where you started. Until some drastically higher res TV standard comes along and takes hold, the larger file size idea is retarded. And, of course, by then most people will have more BW, storage will be cheaper, and compression will be better, so it's a losing game and he's too dumb to see it.
He's supposed to be a tech wiz?
As it stands he has become wealthier in cash (not in stock) than anyone ever associated with Yahoo (Jerry and David are still mostly in stock), which is why I still say he is the smartest Yahoo employee ever.
Knowing when to cash out of a bubble is part of the game - you have to give him that.
why doesn't he build his own pc for 1/2 the cost of a crappy HP media PC?
Why does he think people still care what Mike Tyson has to say?
why does he think Plasma is the future and not just a bridge technology to LCD televisions?
Why does he make a point that no TV manufacturers are making analog TV's anymore when we all know that because the US govt forced them to go digital? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television)
Why does he own so many sony VIAO's when they're cleary an inferior machine to say...a thinkpad?
Why is he doing a reality tv show when reality tv is getting out of hand? If he really really got it wouldn't he have done a reality show before MTV's real world came out like 100yrs ago?
Why does he think 100mbs fiber-to-the-home will change "applications" but his only example is how big brother can watch old people without ever once mentioning distributed computing?
Why doesn't he understand the basic rule of taoism? Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say.
and most of all, if he really really gets it...
Why haven't his mavericks won an NBA title?
whether HDNet is using, or plans to use, the broadcast flag to prevent taping of content? (Sounds like a "no", since he talks about moving it to a keychain, but I'm curious if the message matches his actions)
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
I can't believe that anyone here really believes that Mark Cuban is really a tech visionary. He's a great salesman and a compulsive liar. Put those together and you get what he really is . . . a con artist.
Don't waste any more neural output on this guy. Enough people have paid their hard-earned savings/investments and free time to fund his shenanigans. Where is that 4 Billion dollars of value that yahoo paid for broadcast.com? No where useful. It's been wasted on stupid hobbies, sports teams, hookers and shallow pet-rocks like his blogging. (The hookers are there because the guy is too smarmy to have legitamate human contact). This guy epitomizes the worst part of the dot-com boom. Engineers brought real value, entrepreneurs took risks to advance information technology, and snakes like this guy hurt everybody.
I've been on the other side of the table during business deals with this guy. He knows quite a bit about technology and he uses it exclusively to steal funding from venture funds who are trying to do the right thing who don't know any better. In the process he likes to sound like an engineer to fool the business guys and ridicule legitamate engineers who try to speak the truth. Did we buy his crap? NO WAY. Did other people who were more ready to get bent over the negotiating table. . . you betcha. He is very good at wasting a lot of time and taking peoples money. Don't let him waste your time.
If you spent any more time thinking about Mark Cuban, it should be figuring out how to keep his hands out of your pockets.
...self-indulged, narcissistic pricks.
I agree, my original post was a bit terse. I was trying to get out of the office and not go on a complete, in-depth rant about Mark Cuban.
Mark Cuban is one of those dangerous business people that gets it enough to make other people who don't get it think he's REALLY got it. The latter are people like the goofs at Circuit City's corporate office who thought they would be able to launch the DiVX format. The people that conceived of the DiVX scheme were of the Mark Cuban variety. These are people who can draw up a concept that looks great on paper and in boardroom presentations, but it's got no legs on the street.
Hard drives as a medium are not an elegant solution for the distribution of digital content. In addition to asking people to pony-up the deposit for the hard drive they'll ferry back and forth to the video store, you're also going to ask people to purchase a special player that provides playback, and perhaps some storage capability. He's trying to address the current pinch he (and the people in his tax bracket with 62" HD plasma tv sets) feel for storing HD content. So this concept won't really be addressing a pinch felt widely by consumers until HDTV sets are more widespread. When will that be? I'd say we're still five or more years off from HDTV becoming commonplace.
And here's where the hard drive medium idea becomes a deer in the headlights. If you have to wait five years to get this thing off the ground, you're looking at competing with FTTH (fiber to the home). A much more elegant solution for transferring huge amounts of digital content.
So please don't tell me that Mark Cuban's a few steps ahead of me. He's stuck in the 'trip to the video store' world which really won't exist after FTTH becomes commonplace.
There isn't much difference between Mark Cuban and the folks that started CueCat and the eYeOpener. The big difference is that he cashed out before the market proved his idea (broadcast.com) was weak while those other guys just sank with their ships.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Kinda like the spolied brat programmers who complain about "outsourcing"? Are they like the Nigerian email scammers? I guess it would be more palatable to you if Cuban sold his company for $1? Would you admire him more for that?
These geeks kill me sometimes! lol They want excellent-paying jobs. They wanna be able to afford all the gadgetry in the world, but they don't want the producers of this technology to get rich. Oh NO! Can't have that! lol
He said,
So a future flash drive might be big enough and cheap enough for a single movie. Other drives might be cost-effective with multiple movie rentals at one time, as he also pointed out.
Wow, almost every single prediction he made in 1999 (RealNetworks acquired within a year, death of MP3, iTunes-style music stores not a good idea...) turned out wrong! Is that how he "gets it"?
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
I ran across some HDTV samples today. Check it out!
Any one want to make their own home brew open sourced HD-DVD standard?
,anyone want to "beat" sony again like VHS/Beta did? Get cracking out with an homebrew HD-DVD standard.
1. Keep Mpeg2.
2. lower the rate 20% to say 5mbs
3. increase resolution to 1080i
4. fit one movie on an 9gig Disk thats HD quality.
5. hopefully laptop/pc dvd players can manage it, or mod VLC to handle it. Now all we need next are retail dvd players to play mpeg2 at 1080i/HD.
6. beat blu-ray to the punch, use current disc/blanks technology, not 100% as good, but dam n 90% is close enough for the majority
7. become famous!
8. get interviews
9. improve your resume.
10. profit.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I give mine at least 5, out of respect...
...
forget foreplay, postplay is much better, like the all time favourite:
"Damn woman, get me another pack of smokes I am out"
OK maybe I should just RTFA.
if(this.topic != this.parent.topic)
this.mod(Mod.OFF_TOPIC);
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
PCW: What kinds of future technologies, not necessarily HDTV related, are you looking into?
Cuban: If you put aside biotech, because I don't really know anything about biotech...
and I think he's done some cool crap in his life but once you start a reality-tv show, I can't help but thing 'sellout.'
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I agree...
The problem isn't how the content is delivered.
The problem is the quality of the content and the technologies that impair or hamper consumers use of the content!
HD-DVD, Blu-Ray... blah, blah, blah... seems to me the fight is over who will control the next gen technology!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/23/165522 4
why doesn't he get a big man for his team that can stop Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett from slapping his team around like little b***hes.
I don't remember the details and can't find the story online anymore - anyone know it? The total recipient list may have been closer to 5000. Saw it in Forbes a couple of years ago.
Now, if only his team can get it (the NBA championship). ;-)
People like you would never have invented the wheel.
Actually, a few of them apparently deserve to be called a few names. How are these people any different than those we claim to be fighting against?
Torture is torture - regardless of whose side you're on.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
This is modded flamebait? Who am I flaming? Mark Cuban? Are there a lot of Mark Cuban fanboys I'm offending with my criticism here? This is ridiculous.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Look at the moderation of my critique of Mark Cuban. I'm modded as 'flamebait'. How in the F?!? I had noticed the recurring Mark Cuban articles, and thought perhaps they are paid placements. But the moderation is very suspicious.
I think he is trying to boost his tech-guru image with these media placements.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
They don't intentionally gas their enemies for one.
Abugraihb is a joke. Hell, College dorms give out more toture than they got.