Three Minutes With Mark Cuban 188
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."
His Blog... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I fully agree (Score:3, Informative)
He's talking about, for the forseeable future, the mailing around of hard drives. That means people will need to put down a certain deposit to use the service, and sign for the drive rather than have it just show up in the mailbox, but it won't always be that way.
And of course, if you had cheap enough bandwidth to assorted points, like video rental places for example, you could pipe in HD content and let people come in and copy the DRM'd (of course) video to their disk for a fee and watch it for a couple weeks.
Hedging for dot-com-o-crats (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Nice (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I fully agree (Score:3, Informative)
He made the point that hard drive costs are continually decreasing, while size is continually increasing. Optical discs are fixed size, encumbered with "standards" wars. If they eventually want to up the capacity again, you have to move to a new format, and re-purchase your entire library.
I don't necessarily agree that hard drives are the way to go, but I think it is an interesting approach. He's willing to try something new. What is your proposal?
Actually, no (Score:3, Informative)
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 [archive.org]. But I still have one of the receivers.
Why would someone pay for HDNet? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:OF COURSE MARK CUBAN GETS IT! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Mark Cuban is a con artist (Score:1, Informative)
(The hookers are there because the guy is too smarmy to have legitamate human contact).
So that chick was just a hooker that was paid to claim she was his wife. And his baby daughter is another very expensive 9 month old hooker as well I guess.
Mark Cuban is probably one of the most palatable businessmen out there. He's not the huge tech visionary some people are saying he is.
Regardless, you come off as nothing more than a bitter jealous little prick.
That's EXACTLY what it is! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Lucky or Smart? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I am far from a Dallas Mavericks fan (actually, I am often very embarrassed for their owner), but you are (IMHO) grossly underestimating the impact Mark Cuban has had on that franchise. They were an absolute doormat before he bought them. There was talk of the team folding or moving (that's why they were for sale). Now, they win a majority of their games, they advance in the playoffs (heck, they make the playoffs), people want to see them play (vs. say the Hawks, that's how bad the Mavs used to be), and the team may actually be turning a profit (it is hard to say in sports, there are so many contracts and deals, I don't even want to get into the stadium issues, that really gets me upset). The fact that they haven't won a championship is not that damning, considering only six teams (Boston, LA Lakers, Detroit, Chicago, Houston, and San Antonio) have done that in the last 20 years! Looks to me like you are not much of a basketball fan (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), so as a basketball fan I wouldn't discount Mark Cuban's success with the Mavericks so easily.