Mark Cuban Continues to Baffle

He’s at it again.  One of the few people to really cash in on the first internet boom is back on the road telling everyone else they’ve missed the party:

“The Internet is dead. It’s had its time; say goodbye,” said Cuban, who helped launched HDNet in 2001 and remains its chairman. He bolstered his claim by saying the Internet and popular sites such as YouTube can’t provide high-definition programming like cable and can’t offer the interactivity that cable programmers can.”

Look, I think Cuban is a smart guy, but he just isn’t making sense.  What does HD have to do with social networking?  Does Twitter need HD?  And if HD is so important to people why is YouTube, the single worst resolution video site on the planet, still the most successful?  Blip is far better to watch but that doesn’t seem to sway most people.

Is the internet going to be the epicenter for entertaining video?  Maybe not. Maybe that will migrate to my HD TV but I think it is going to be more about the internet going HD than TV/Cable going internet.

(link)

Cuban Scoops His Own Theaters

Mark Cuban has always been viewed as a bit of a renegade, an image he seems pretty committed to maintaining and growing at all costs.  Sometimes he comes off sounding like an idiot (i.e. “The Internet’s dead. It’s over.”) but he often gets ahead of the curve to positive results.

One example is his desire to explore different ways of releasing features, including putting them on TV and then into a theater, as his doing with his latest film, Flawless. (via TechDirt)

“Flawless is actually debuting on Cuban’s HDNet TV channel two days before the theatrical release. Slowly, but surely, perhaps theater owners will recognize that they can’t rely on artificial scarcity to get people into the seats. They’ll have to start innovating and offering a better experience. Perhaps it’s worth noting that Cuban is also a theater owner… and appears to actually be working hard on making the theater experience better and experimenting with unique business models. If he, as a theater owner, isn’t scared of “competing” against home theaters, why are other theater owners so afraid?”

Personally, I have found my theater-going experiences to be a series of diminishing returns.  It is expensive, I’m bombarded from the moment I set foot in the theater to a stream of unwanted advertising, the food selections stink and cost too much and the audience tends to be less than attentive at all times.

For theaters to survive they need to look at what makes us want to leave home and partake in a social experience.  How can they make that experience as positive and possible?

Cuban Questions Eisner as SXSWi

The billionaire-owner of an NBA franchise interviewed the man who once ran Disney about value and future of web content. This is probably more important for the fact that these two guys think this is a serious area to be discussing than what they actually discussed.

However, PaidContent has some coverage for all of us. A few highlights for me:

“The time is right… we’re going to along for awhile and maybe make a little money… and then all of the sudden we’re going to wake up and then professionally driven content for the internet is going to explode.”

“If you take the position that you’re going to own all your own content, you’re going to end up with nothing.”

CNet has further coverage on the talk and some interesting information on the just-released new webisodic from Eisner called The All-For-Nots.

“There are no rules yet, Eisner said, to the point where company strategies can change erratically and make the process all the more complicated. For example, he said, the distribution strategy for The All-for-Nots will be different from Prom Queen because potential content distribution partners didn’t present them with the same deals.

“Every time you go to a MySpace or MSN or YouTube or Google, every month, they change the strategy,” Eisner said. “People actually paid us money (for Prom Queen).” With The All-for-Nots, he explained, some of the same content partners had wanted Vuguru to pay them and then get the money back through advertising revenue sharing.

So the content partners this time–which include Bebo, Imeem, YouTube, Hulu, Veoh (which counts Eisner among its board of directors), and Mark Cuban’s HDNet–will be a different set, but Eisner said he doesn’t care, as long as it’s distributed to plenty of eyeballs. “We have to go it any way we can go. We start at the top, we start at the bottom, we start at the sides.” That’s certainly start-up rhetoric.”

Good to hear he’s having all the same problems with his show as every other content creator out there.