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."

Comments

I fully agree

[SethJohnson]

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

Lucky or Smart?

[puppetman]

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.

People listen to him because he got rich selling his company to Yahoo during the .com boom.

He got rich, and now people think he has some sort of unique insight. I think he just got lucky with the timing.

Re:Lucky or Smart?

[warmboot]

Timing is a distinct part of making your own luck; Cuban saw an opportunity and went for it -- that makes him smart. The fact that Yahoo! paid him a stupid amount of cash was due, in part, to the luck of the tech boom. More power to him

Re:Lucky or Smart?

[melkorainur]

> Less of a fluke artist than that guy that started hotmail and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Not sure I follow how hotmail's founder is a fluke artist (i assume you mean someone who succeeded just by chance?) The original hotmail, prior to MS, was innovative and an intentional success imho. They had a decent backend that had good uptime back when clustering and high availability wasn't yet widely available. Hotmail and their employees intended to create a product that provided functionality desired by its users and then it got sold to Microsoft. As for the guy who started it, Sabeer Bhatia, from what I understand, it was his intent to provide something like context specific advertising, sort of like what gmail provides today. Now if he and his team had done hotmail on a whim on his lunch break and Microsoft turned around and bought it for 400M, then I'd say that was a fluke. Come to think of it, I'm having a hard time finding flukes in the computing industry. What can you come up with that was done in a really short period of time and really, truly, unintentionally became a success.

Society of the Spectacle

[Potor]

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.

He sells this as if it is content, but in fact it is just the opposite ... At least newscasts generally attempt to give a framework and a grasp of what's happening. He is offering nothing more than an ersatz experience made all the more ersatz by emulation. When will this technology spatter blood on its viewers too?

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

Re:Society of the Spectacle

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Just like television made the news more personal to the viewer compared to radio broadcasts and just as radio broadcasts made the news more personal compared to newspaper articles. I don't think there is anything wrong with bringing as close a simulation as possible home to the general public. Sure, there is the initial ooohing and aaahing over the technology rather than relating to the actual events, but that wears off quickly enough.

With all the unacknowledged bias in news "reporting" these days, I don't think editorialization is really as valuable as you make it out to be. Certainly even raw footage can have en editorial bias, but without words to twist the viewer's perspective, that can only go so far.

As someone who has put more money than he should have into his home theater, I can definitely tell you that an accurate battlefield simulation can scare the crap out of you with only the slightest suspension of disbelief. The realism that hidef video and audio can provide is enough to convince my cat that the birds on the screen are real enough that he has tried to jump through and kill them on a number of occasions, something that previously has only happened with a real window with real birds.

I suspect that your hypothetical 3D blood-spatter system(TM) would be all the more effective in giving the more hawkish among the population pause to consider exactly what it means for both our troops and the "enemy" to declare war and go off to battle.

Re:We're up to 6 minutes now I guess...

[Lshmael]

If you clicked on the link to the article, or even looked at the status bar, you would realize that this post was talking about a PC World interview, while the previous post was about one of Cuban's blog posts. While the interview is dated September 2, the blog post is dated August 21. Yes, he talks about DVDs and hard drives in both, but it is not a dupe.

Re:Way Too Excited

[hexcentric1]

I don't see anything wrong with showing people what is going on around the world. Grainy images on a small little TV tend to make it less real for most people. Look back a few years; people had seen images of war, but that did not prepare them for the media's coverage of Vietnam. Now people are somewhat desensitized to violence on television; seeing the detail that has been missing may help people realize just how violent war really is.

Re:Narcistic Car Sales Man

[Grell]

"Man hard drives vs. optical discs.... what is he thinking."

Well maybe that while the big dogs get into a knock down fight about the "next thing"! 'Blue Ray vs whatever' there's money to be made in a media that's dropping in price like a stone? (50c a gig soon believed to be under 25C a gig w/ terabyte size drives)

Did you read the whole article?

I'd pay the kind of money he's talking about for 40 movies a month of my choice. ($100 startup delivers the disk, then $20 a month to trade the drive out for a new one full of movies.) Of course this is all speculative stuff for him, but could be done w/ todays tech while we await the next big thing in whatever DRM'd optical disc standard is next in line.

Hell's bells man, what if their is no clear standard for say, 4 years? Want to go buy 2 sets of video/media players again? (vhs/beta)

Sure it's speculation, but it's not quite as useless as you make it out to be at least imho.

~G

Am I the only one thinking of Ray Bradbury ?

[DrYak]

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.

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. ...now please excuse-me, while I'll getting my thin-foil hat before governement tries to erase my mind by boardcasting lasers from my TV-set...
{ /mode-paranoid: Off; }

Re:Way Too Excited

[zaxios]

Seeing the detail that has been missing may help people realize just how violent war really is.

I don't agree with that - not when war movies have HD level of image and sound quality already. If anything, it just places real war and real death in the context of entertainment - a sort of "I hope you enjoyed 'Bad Boys II'; stay tuned for more footage from Najaf".

When war footage is packaged in the form of television and juxtaposed to entertainment or news anchors with meticulously arranged hair and placed within a red border with some text from a special font on it, actual death and fighting is trivialized. Turning war into eye candy, which Cuban seems enthused about, is really just an extension of this mentality.

Tech Savvy?

[LMNTK]

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

Re:He's a bigger geek than Taco

[killjoe]

More important question is.

Does he show the actual carnage or is it just "wowie just look at how our soldiers shoot the terrorists just like that video game".

I admit most americans would enjoy shootage of their soldiers destroying towns, buildings, and of course thousands of people but they don't seem to want to actually see the bown apart bodies or the mass graves that are dug afterwards.

Re:Yippee! Another billionaire for us to adore!

[cot]

'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?

respectully, I must say...

[SethJohnson]

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.

Re:He's a bigger geek than Taco

[iceperson]

I know when I was in the Marines all I wanted to do was kill innocent civilians. And as I carried my full alice pack on 15+ mile humps I couldn't help but think how much like a video game protecting the freedom for people to be total a$$holes really was. Maybe you can meet some of our servicemen and women at the airport as they come home so you can spit on them and call them babykillers. I've got an even better idea... just go here.

Re:He's a bigger geek than Taco

[killjoe]

Oh I suppose those 500 pound bombs were delivering cinnamon buns then huh? And those mass graves? do they contain barbie dolls?

Listen I am sorry that the reality of the situation is so harsh and not to your liking but you can't deny that american soldiers have killed tens of thousands of innocent civillians. Why? To put down some insurgency in fallujiah or najaf. What the fuck kind of reason is that? Why is that your job?

Are you seriously claiming the US military never kills civillians?

Oh and keep thinking that you are "protecting people's freedom" I am sure it helps you sleep better. Too bad the only people who deserve freedom also happen to have something you want. The people in Sudan, Liberia, china, north korea, palestine, chechnia etc can continue to starve, be massacred, subjugated and die off in disgusting numbers because you can't be bothered to lift a finger to help them. It's much more important to deliver najaf back to alawi, we just can't let some cleric control a city damnit. Those people deserve to be ruled by somebody we handpicked not some damned cleric!.

Re:Call them babykillers

[The Angry Mick]

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.