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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
"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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
"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
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
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.
I think like this:
go to website: www.somerentalmovie.com
search for movie.
select movie for viewing.
desktop box pings server through net, downloads movie locally to HD while you are still at work. You come home at 6:30 pm, your movie(s) and shows are ready to watch. have 100 gigs of storage or somthing like that.
next day, repeat. I would pay 100 for the set top box, and $3 per film. at that price, I would not pirate, because it would be too much hassle.
Even illegal street vendors could not compete because they would have to sell each dvd for less than 3 and that would not be worth it.
And peer to peer would not be able to compete, because of the ease of use and quality of the product.
Now, if they are really smart, the system would allow for decentralized movie downloading.
for example.
Person A downloads Master and Commander widescreen to set top box (STB) from central server.
download takes 12 hours.
Person B queues same movie. A's STB allows port open from B's STB's ip to download that movie.
Eventually, all the users's spare bandwidth is used in carrying all that suff back and forth, and the users don't mind because they're paying monthly fees already anyway.
Put programming at $1 per hour. three hour movie, $3. two hour movie, 2$. 40 minutes sitcom: 40 cents.
People complain because no ad revenue... I say: imagine how many more people can watch your show if they don't have to watch it thrusday at 5:30, but can watch it anytime.
"Piter, too, is dead."
If you knew anything about Cuban, you'd know how stupid your question is. He isn't ON the company payroll, he FUNDS the company payroll. This is the guy that sold off broadcast.com for a sweet billion dollars and has proceeded to stay a step ahead of pretty much everyone on the technology curve. He's also one of the sincerest people you could meet. I hate to use this phrase because it sounds so fucking fanboyish, but the guy just radiates honesty. You know he's not bullshitting you. Down here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area he's on TV all the fucking time, and I have never got the impression he's anything more than a regular guy that happened to make an assload of money and is now using that money to do all the stupid shit he wanted when he DIDN'T have money. Fer fuck's sake, he bought his multi-million dollar house because the marble floors in one of the larger rooms was great for roller hockey.
What I'm saying is, he IS one of the real people and more importantly he's one of the SMART people that actually knows what they're talking about.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
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.
In other words, you're jealous and would give your left nut to be either one of them for a day. But as the usual geek, you spout crap about them to make yourself feel better.
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
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?
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
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.