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

He's a bigger geek than Taco

[Patik]

His company's site is even coded with valid HTML, something that can't be said for many major sites.

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."

Re:He's a bigger geek than Taco

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading that quote reminded me of when I was recently watching the Democratic National Convention on INHD a few weeks ago. It was completely devoid of commentaries, interviews, political polls and what not. I even watched the entire performance of Black Eyed Peas. Anyhow, I decided to surf to a different channel and happened to land on MSNBC. After watching it for a little while and listening to all the various talking heads, it was so obvious to me that you can come away with a totally different point of view when watching it with commentaries versus without. So in response to that quote, yeah, I think it's pretty amazing to watch...

OF COURSE MARK CUBAN GETS IT!

[edrugtrader]

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

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:Nice

[black mariah]

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.