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.

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: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.

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: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: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.