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Television Media

Mark Cuban on the future of HD Media 293

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
kcmarshall writes "Mark Cuban's most recent blog post talks about what media will carry HD movies and content. The post makes it obvious that he's not a typical exec with a secretary who checks his email for him. He writes about ripping DVDs "that [he] had PURCHASED" to keychain drives and copying HD content to an external FireWire drive. He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats."
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Mark Cuban on the future of HD Media More

Mark Cuban on the future of HD Media

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  • Wacky Marky (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slashnutt ( 807047 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:35PM (#10047707) Journal
    I would like to think Marky is a really great Tech Leader after all, he did sell his company to Yahoo for more than I can remember making him several hundred million in the transaction purchasing the Dallas Mavericks to entertain him (living pretty good). But then you get to read his blog and he just now has discovered the compression algorithms everyone has been using to put DVD on CD (SVCD at 600 or so MB). He thinks that making larger formats is going to thwart piracy yet he didn't connect the dots where you can always take a higher format and compress it to a lower quality format of any size you want. Lets say that today we would have 50gb HD-DVDs what would prevent me from squeezing that file to 600mb know? Piracy isn't the problem, it the business model. People want to view a moving they OWN on whatever media they choose. In fact the best of all worlds would be to have a Google type service where you purchase a movie and it is stored online for you. You can watch it whenever, put it on whatever media and sell your rights after your done. The future of media is not Video On Demand (that was last year) it Video On Demand ownership over Wireless (well maybe not the ownership).

    • Re:Wacky Marky (Score:5, Insightful)

      by telstar ( 236404 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:43PM (#10047801)
      "In fact the best of all worlds would be to have a Google type service where you purchase a movie and it is stored online for you. You can watch it whenever, put it on whatever media and sell your rights after your done. The future of media is not Video On Demand (that was last year) it Video On Demand ownership over Wireless (well maybe not the ownership)."
      • And how exactly do you prevent somebody from building their own 'rental' library for all of this transferrable content? Now you've got one copy of a movie in circulation being 'rented' out to hundreds or thousands of individuals. The point-of-sale company sees revenue from one sale, while the rental manager builds a fortune. This used to work with VHS movie 'cause the tapes cost like $200 each ... but it's going to be a hard transition for companies to make and they'll fight the transferrable-license thing all the way to their graves.

      • Re:Wacky Marky (Score:2, Redundant)

        by Lord Kano ( 13027 )
        And how exactly do you prevent somebody from building their own 'rental' library for all of this transferrable content?

        Isn't this what Blockbuster, Hollywood and Netflix are doing right now? Buy one copy of a movie and rent it hundreds or thousands of time for a profit?

        LK
      • DRM dude, where have you been hiding? DRM kicks the revenue back to the license holder because they retain control of the content.

      • Re:Wacky Marky (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bobaferret ( 513897 )
        I don't think that would really be a problem. No more than BlockBuster is now. You may have the reansferable ownership rights, but you still don't have the right to make copies, nor do the people renting onw the movie at the end of the day. There is alos a time factor, that says it takes me x number of hours to watch thins and download, and while that's happening, no one else can use it. The fact that RentOne resnt backhows doesn't maen that they are killing Catapiller.
    • Yes.. give use HD-DVD's or whatever, so that the movies are so big, that they need so fast drives, that unless you put your player in a different room, you can't hear the soundtrack from all the "GHHHRHRHHHRHH" of the DVD drive. That's great.

      Then we have to compress the movies to something that can be stored on our hard drives just to avoid the noise caused by HD-DVD drives overheating by trying to read all the data.

      This is nothing new. There was a drop in PC-games piracy when CDROM's came, before CD-R d

  • For now... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by saider ( 177166 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:36PM (#10047717)
    "He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats."

    That'll last for a few years. I remember the same argument for DVDs and CDs before them.

    • Re:For now... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:39PM (#10047747) Homepage
      That'll last for a few years. I remember the same argument for DVDs and CDs before them.

      You really think it'll take that long? Unless they increase the format size by an order of magnitude, broadband speeds will catch up within the year.

      What, we already have service in the 20-30mbit range.
      • ..and the guy himself who wrote this thing is ripping dvd's.. taking a too big format for his uses and shrinking it down.

      • Re:For now... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by hypnagogue ( 700024 )

        What, we already have service in the 20-30mbit range.

        I call BS. Some people may have shared bandwidth of 20-30mbit, but it is far from being generally available. Go ahead and spin up every household downloading HDTV streams at 15mbit each and then calculate the bandwidth needed in the network. That's easily 10 years away for 90% of Americans.

        And, if you ask around, you'll find out quickly that most people have only one broadband provider available for their household -- without any form of competition

        • Re:For now... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I call BS. Some people may have shared bandwidth of 20-30mbit, but it is far from being generally available. Go ahead and spin up every household downloading HDTV streams at 15mbit each and then calculate the bandwidth needed in the network. That's easily 10 years away for 90% of Americans.

          That's why you build distributed redundancy in a network. The bandwidth potential of a single fiber is so astonishing that it is not particulary difficult to distribute demand HD service.

          This type of distribution alr

      • Re:For now... (Score:4, Informative)

        by 0111 1110 ( 518466 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:55PM (#10048786)
        What, we already have service in the 20-30mbit range. ...in Japan. Outside of Tokyo or Seoul I don't know of many places with that kind of bandwidth. My friend still uses 56k and I use a 1.5 Mbit cable modem. Back in 2000 I had a 7.1 Mbit ADSL line. Also, remember that for p2p content distribution the UL bandwidth is more important than the DL bandwidth. UL bandwidth hasn't progressed much at all.

        The fact is that changes in broadband bandwidth are far more dependant on economics than on technology. If the large monopolistic communication corps don't think faster speeds for p2p will increase their bottom line, it just won't happen. In fact many ISPs are intentionally blocking all p2p ports that they can find. So I'm not so sure things are progressing the way you think they are, but it is nice to be young... Warp drive is only a few years away.
    • Compression is here now. It won't last a few years. CD-R and DVD-R sized rips will appear just like they do now. Perhaps the larger file format will slow down compression a bit but it won't be a real deterrent.
      • he says:
        Compression is here now. It won't last a few years. CD-R and DVD-R sized rips will appear just like they do now. Perhaps the larger file format will slow down compression a bit but it won't be a real deterrent.
        Hello, warez scene to old guy, that shit is old news ! DVD Rips are flying around like packets on a hot griddle these days, especially since suprnova started hosting torrents. There are dvd_r images on xdccs too on IRC, check #dvd_r on everyones favorite irc network (efnet) i believe. I dow

    • Re:For now... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Asterixian ( 806481 )
      I realize that everybody knows increasing file sizes only buys you so much time, but there's another much more important reason why this is a terrible idea.

      CPU processing "power", which could be represented for the purposes of this situation as instructions per second, is increasing exponentially over time at a rate of approximately 25-50% per year. Note that this is not as fast as Moore's Law, because that applies to the number of transistors per chip, not instructions per second.

      Telecommunications,
    • Unless they can drastically increase the amount of data that goes into the signal to begin with, it'll just be filler data anyways (ie you can pull it out without damaging the compressed quality). And unless we drastically improve our video hardware, that's not going to happen. Next to nobody can afford high quality video hardware as it is, so it's just not realistic. If the TVs keep the same resolution and refresh rate, you can't increase the amount of real data.

      As far as music goes, there's just not enou

  • You make a bigger file format (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:37PM (#10047728)
    I'll get more bandwidth.

    A decade ago, downloading an mp3/ogg would've taken me a long while (that was probably 28.8 modem days.) Now it's done almost before I begin.

    5 years ago, download a CD/movie would've taken me a long while. Today it's a reasonable period of time.

    Today, a DVD takes me a while to download. Overnight usually. But you know what? With Verizon and other companies getting ready to offer services at up to 30 Mbps, I'm pretty sure my downloads are about to get faster again.

  • bigger file formats... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Paul Neubauer ( 86753 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:38PM (#10047731)
    ...will simply meet file translation and compression utilities.
    • What's wrong with DVD's? I mean compressing am HD movie down to DVD size isn't going to hurt your quality that bad. It's not like taking a DVD and making it a VCD. The quality is great and you'll be able to play it back on your DVD player. And I don't know about you guys, but a 2CD xvid rip looks great on my TV with my computers TV out. So no problem there.

      I don't think anything can stop piracy in this digital age short of goverment monitoring all our traffic, big brother style. And with encryption this is
      • >I mean compressing am HD movie down to DVD size isn't going to hurt your quality that bad

        Don't know if you've tried - it took my PC (Althon 1.6GHz) almost a whole day to convert AVI to VCD... I don't even dare to think how long HD->DVD conversion would take on a home computer.
        • HD (mpeg2) to DVD (mpeg2) should take an AthlonXP 2000 anywhere from 2-6 hours, depending upon the number of passes and how badly you want to maximize quality for your 4+ Gigs of DVD-R.

          Right now, my computer does the same thing with the freeware DVDShrink from DVD-mpeg2 to DVD-mpeg2 (9 Gigs to 4 Gigs) in about 1-2 hours with "deep analysis."

          Your AVI to VCD slow conversion may have been due to inefficient VCD conversion software, maximizing the number of passes, or some other reason.

          • Requantization != recompression.

            Requantization requires that the input and output video are of the same resolution and framerate. (Requant operates at the stream level, on data that has already been DCTed and does not touch the motion vectors at all.)

            Requant works well for DVDShrink because you rarely shrink a DVD (after stripping out extra features, etc.) to less than 80% or so of its original size.

            To go from 8+ GB/hour (typical ATSC HD bitrate) down to only 2 GB/hour or so will make MPEG-2 video unwat

    • Re:bigger file formats... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tet ( 2721 ) * <.ku.oc.enydartsa. .ta. .todhsals.> on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:50PM (#10047900) Homepage Journal
      ...will simply meet file translation and compression utilities.

      I was wondering if anyone else would spot this. He's right in that they can provide content in formats that are impractical to transfer over the net, for at least the next few years. Yes, bandwidth costs are plummeting, but not as fast as mass storage costs are, and delivering high quality content on mass storage seems like a feasible option. But there's nothing stopping anyone from encoding high quality content down to lower quality formats and distributing those instead.

      The real kicker here, is that the public don't care about quality. Yes, I care. Others do, too. But the general public don't. I work with people that are quite happy to watch movies they've downloaded with really visible compression artifacts rather than buy the DVD. But DVD quality is deemed good enough for most, and it's already feasible to download a DVD. So what if the content is available in higher quality formats. I'll buy it. But the mass market won't, when it's available for free at DVD quality. And without support from the mass market, illegal copying becomes a real problem for content providers.

      • Re:bigger file formats... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Oliver Wendell Jones ( 158103 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:58PM (#10047984)
        Actually, most of us watch the crappy version with visible compression artifacts to avoid paying the outrageous prices at the theater.

        My girlfriend has 3 kids from a previous relationship and it costs a *fortune* to take us all out to see a film. Even at the $1.00 theater, we'll still burn through $20+ at the concession stand.

        If a movie is any good, I have no problem going out and buying the DVD when it's released, although I usually buy the previously-viewed copies from Blockbuster...

        • Re:bigger file formats... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by dasmegabyte ( 267018 ) <das@OHNOWHATSTHISdasmegabyte.org> on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:23PM (#10048248) Homepage Journal
          Say, there's a great thing to teach kids. "Hey kids, we're gonna be pirating a movie tonight, because it's slightly cheaper! Maybe if we like the movie we stole, we'll buy a used copy of the DVD in six months time!"

          I cannot get my head around the mentality that says it is alright to take content just because it is expensive and there's no obvious victim. This is the same mentality that leads to people throwing trash on the side of the road, because it's just one diaper and nobody's watching. If you can't afford to take your girlfriends' kids to a movie, stay the fuck home. Rent one of thousands of kick ass classics on DVD. Otherwise you're teaching those kids that stealing is alright if they can't afford it and there's little chance of getting caught. This is wrong no matter how you nicely you slice it.
          • Well, there is another option: "Hey kids, we're gonna 'see' a 'movie' by going to the library and reading a book! Close your eyes and start pretending!"

        • So it's okay to copy movies because the candy and the drinks are too expensive??
        • Even at the $1.00 theater, we'll still burn through $20+ at the concession stand.

          Or you can spend $5 on tickets and eat before you go...isn't it possible to not eat or drink for two hours?

      • Totally agree. Some movies (like the Matrix or Lord of the Rings) you want to see in a theatre or in all it's HD glory.

        Documentaries, love stories, comedies--I'm happy watching these at 640x480 at a slight angle with people occasionally getting up to get more pop corn.

        You are absolutely right: down sampling completely kills his argument.
      • Exactly so - I typically watch tv rips at 350mb for a ~42 minute show. And yet, I see copies a few days later at 120mb or 80mb, with people downloading and watching. Sure, it's kinda butt ugly, but there are people out there who can and presumably do enjoy it.

  • Holy cow (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tebriel ( 192168 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:38PM (#10047738)
    Someone thinking of how to use technological innovations for profit instead of viewing them as Pure Evil(tm)?

    Incredible. I love it.

  • Bigger File Formats??? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LanMan04 ( 790429 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:39PM (#10047749)
    Yeah, transfering 4.7GB of data across the internet was totally out of the question in 1997 (unless you were in college on ethernet), but now I could grab a 4.7GB image from a Torrent within a day with my cable modem connection. So what'll stop us from downloading 200GB super-HD movies across our mega-super-broadband in 2011? Didn't RFTA.

    • The Short Answer (Score:4, Insightful)

      by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:06PM (#10048070)
      what will eventually limit people from downloading media is the free time they'll have to play/listen/watch it.
      • That doesn't stop people NOW, why will it stop them in the future? There's plenty of people on Usenet right now downloading more content than there is time in the day to watch/listen to/read.

    • I don't think the movie industry needs to panic (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Luscious868 ( 679143 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:46PM (#10048645)

      I'll tell you why the movie industry doesn't need to panic. There's value in a DVD. I've got no problem plopping down $20 - $25 for a DVD. I get a lot of value for the money. You've got the movie itself which is in a format that looks great on my big screen TV. You get the surround sound mix. You usually get a ton of extras. All in all, I think it's worth the money.

      CD's on the other hand are a total rip off. You pay $12 - $18 bucks for about an hour of music, most of which is filler for the 1 - 4 good songs on the CD. There's very little value there and hence you've got more people who are willing to pirate music because they recognize they are being ripped off.

      I don't think DVD piracy will ever be as much of a problem as music piracy because the movie industry generally provides some real value for the money that your spending.

      The music industry should take a hint. Offer singles and albumns on the internet for people who don't want all of the frills (which is finally starting to happen). Produce a CD / DVD package for customers in the $20 - $25 dollar value range. The CD would, obviously containt he music. The DVD would contain all of the music mixed in surround sound, plus music videos and other extras like interviews with the band, etc. Something like that would be worth the money. Continue offering just the CD for those that don't want the extra's and price it in the $7 - $11 dollar range. CD sales would go up instantly.

      • I disagree (Score:4, Informative)

        by Trepidity ( 597 ) <[gro.hsikcah] [ta] [todhsals-muiriled]> on Monday August 23, 2004 @08:09PM (#10051553)
        There are very few movies which I consider as valuable as a quality CD. Maybe if movies were half the price of CDs I'd buy them, but in general a movie is good for 1.5-2 hours of enjoyment, or in exceptional cases maybe I can watch it 3-5 times and get up to 10 hours of enjoyment out of it. Compare to a CD, which can provide hundreds of hours of enjoyment.

        This isn't to say that there isn't a lot of music being produced that is a ripoff at $12-$18 per CD, because there is. But for some good music, that often took a year or so of the artist's time to write and record, it's not a bad price at all. Especially with lesser-known artists, who might be extremely lucky if they sell 5,000 copies of their CD, the $12-$18 isn't really enough to even support them without a day job.

  • Bigger File Formats? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darth_MALL ( 657218 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:39PM (#10047751)
    I agree that this is an obviously effective countermeasure to piracy since storage is so cheap (and getting cheaper). Shouldn't they be trying a little harder to maximize the potential of existing or near-future tech to fight piracy? I could use a 10,000 character password to keep you out of my account, but wouldn't a complex short password be a hell of a lot more practical? Seems wasteful and kind of a cop-out. A "the bad guys have already won" kind of attitude

  • Bigger files? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TiggertheMad ( 556308 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:40PM (#10047759) Journal
    Bigger files will prevent copywrite infringment for a short while, until computers advance a year or two, and can them easily handle more data.

    When I bought a P90 in the 1990s, the idea that you could put an entire album of music on a drive was silly. Hard drives were 500mb to 800mb at the time, and 16 bit 44100 for two channels filled hundreds of megs in uncompressed format. Then MP3 compression appeared, along with Multi-gigabyte drives.

    Go ahead, use larger file formats. The pirates of tomorrow will appreciate the extra quailty.

    • Re:Bigger files? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mr_z_beeblebrox ( 591077 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:50PM (#10047898) Journal
      Bigger files will prevent copywrite infringment for a short while, until computers advance a year or two, and can them easily handle more data.

      Exactly! Also, people WANT to be able to do this...so the computer companies will be driven by that DESIGN goal. The MPAA and the RIAA are not bigger customers to the home PC market than me, you and our parents friends etc... :-) If they make a 50 GB file format, comcast will offer 30-50 MB downloads, Compaq will come up with a home PC with raid 5 and 1 GB of Ram with dual processors (isn't that the Longhorn requirements :-)

  • Mark Cuban (Score:5, Insightful)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:40PM (#10047761)
    People will always download anything at any size if they want it bad enough. People sleep and their computers don't.

    Just like there was a conspiracy rumor about government preventing the 100mbps network deployment to people's home because it just promotes pirating even more. Bullshit? I dunno.

  • HD Content Downloads (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rura Penthe ( 154319 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:41PM (#10047774)
    "I ask if anyone in the room has ever downloaded or uploaded a movie or TV show in HD quality to or from a P2P network. No one has ever raised their hand. That is in spite of the fact that HDTV has been in the clear, over the air since 1998."

    /me raises hand a few hundred times... I realize I am in a small (but growing) group of people, but I download HD content on a regular basis. Not just DVD resolution HD transcodes, but full 720p and 1080i MPEG-2 transport streams, XviD rips, and WMV9. Mark is right that less people will download as files get bigger, but bandwidth is on the upswing again (6mbps seems to be becoming more widespread for cable modems), and more efficient codecs like h.264 will help bring down sizes again. Not to mention borrowing media from your friends. Size will only slow down, not stop piracy.

    Mark's assertion that by this time next year we'll be looking at 1TB drives for 25 cents per GB might be a bit optimistic as well. ;)
    • I'd like to raise my hand here too. I've been downloading HD movies and tv shows recently from HDTV newsgroups. Matrix Reloaded 720 is about 4.5 gigs. LOTR TTT EE 1080 is 18.5 gigs. I'm using a $24 unlimited downloading monthly account from giganews.com via cable modem.

      Does anyone know of any bitorrent sites or anything else that is a good source of HDTV stuff? Until I came across the newgroups, I was on the verge of getting Voom and a DVHS so that I could archive shows with HD-WM9 in 1080 to a teraby

  • What I want from Mark (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:43PM (#10047796) Journal
    I suspect the people still working in digital multimedia would be less interested in Mark's wisdom on technology than in his advice on the optimum time to sell their soon-to-be-worthless company to Yahoo and buy a basketball team...
    • No the trick wasn't just selling his soon to be worthless company to yahoo, plenty of others did that and don't have the cash for a player's salary now. It's hedging your now large yahoo stake with put options, before the value craters that gets you a basketball team.

  • Huge File Formats (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mr.Dippy ( 613292 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:43PM (#10047797)
    If that happens then the only people who can pirate movies will be people with a lot of bandwidth/high speed internet connections. Then you are going to see wacky legislation come into play where the Government will prosecute anybody who has anything more then a cable modem coming into his or her house. Good times.

  • Larger formats cannot solve the problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Performer Guy ( 69820 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:43PM (#10047805)
    This has to be one of the most short sighted solutions I've heard. Firstly compression would always yield some content at current formats even if the source was larger. Even more predictably, after a few years the larger formats would easily fit on emerging media and devices as data density increases and costs continue to decline. Most obviously any larger format would require a media for public distribution, say HD-DVD and that format would almost immediately be adopted by the PC industry as a denser data format allowing unencrypted content of the equivalent size & quality to be ripped and burned after a quick visit to Fry's.
    • Firstly compression would always yield some content at current formats even if the source was larger.

      Which already is used [divx.com] to some extent. For some pirates, it's good enough. And given some of the theatre sizes and soundsystems in my town at least, it's comparable to the local movieplex. Since not everyone is going to blow 50 k$ on a home theatre, especially in the current economy, this bodes ill.

      • You don't have to compete with the theatre, you have to compete with whatever scraps they throw at your TV. Heck most of Hollywood's big beef right now is compressed NTSC resolution data. Even anamorphic has the same line count as NTSC or less if > 16:9 so it's not exactly gonna stop everyone in their tracks. HD will just increase the lines. Lots of people have HDTVs, most are 1080i capable, or 720p take your pick. It ain't gonna get better than that unless you're on a PC monitor. The point is there's no
  • From the article: "The bigger question, the Billion Dollar question is how to deliver content on or to hard drives, regardless of size and capacity, in a way that consumers will enjoy it, and do it cost effectively today?"

    That really is the big question...there are many people out there who enjoy DVDs that don't understand enough about computers to mess with hard drives. People generally don't seem to like change, and would probably rather stick with DVDs than switch to a new format. This is all idle spe

  • I like the way he's thinking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wolfemi1 ( 765089 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:44PM (#10047815)

    You should fight piracy by making what you sell higher quality, so that anything you could easily pirate would be a cheap knockoff of what you can give them for a fee. This would be almost a shareware-like system, where you could get a crippled version for free, and, if you like it, pay money for the high quality, full version.

    This would make piracy tolerable, since it would be more of a "try-before-you-buy" sort of system.

    • This would make piracy tolerable, since it would be more of a "try-before-you-buy" sort of system.

      Except for the fact that with a movie what you are selling is not quality. You're telling a story.

      Sure the story is better with higher quality; but once you've already told someone a story, are they likely to want to hear it again with slightly higher fidelity anytime in the next six months?
      • Sure the story is better with higher quality; but once you've already told someone a story, are they likely to want to hear it again with slightly higher fidelity anytime in the next six months?

        How many iterations of Lord of the Rings are there on DVD? The special, deluxe, special deluxe, deluxe special deluxe, special deluxe special...

        And then there's the idea that many people purchase movies on DVD that they've seen in the theater, despite the fact that the version they saw in the theater is far highe
    • The key word here is "should". I agree, if you put out a high quality product, a DVD with lots of cool features, great video and audio quality, and, above all, a movie that is good enough that people are willing to buy it, then piracy wouldn't be that big of an issue. But try telling this to the MPAA...
  • So by delivering content on Hard Drives rather than DVDs, we will be able to continue to increase the picture quality for years to come.
    This is true in one aspect, but the HD storage medium is one that may not hold up to these increased picture qualities. Seemingly endless in capacity, there may be a faster transfer mechanism on a new storage medium (bio-organic?) that would be necessary to transfer the larger data stream for these pictures.

    That sais, portable media will always be more about small footpri

  • Gee (Score:2, Insightful)

    by PedanticSpellingTrol ( 746300 )
    Yeah, because compressing 1280 x "whatever" video is so much harder than standard NTSC. *cough drop every other line cough* seriously, people download 600 mb divx rips because the quality is "good enough", making a bigger, badder original file isn't going to change anything.

  • Doesn't get it... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dmayle ( 200765 ) * on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:48PM (#10047882) Homepage Journal

    He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats

    He's obviously someone that just doesn't get it. He must of missed out on the whole MP3 thing. In his rant, he talks about how no one he's run into has ever uploaded or downloaded an HD movie from the net. He fails to ask, however, if anyone's ever uploaded or downloaded a movie that came from HDTV sources.

    Sure, while bandwidth is low, people won't be downloading HDTV content, but once there's fiber to the door that will change.

    There's an ISP in my area (Free [www.free.fr]) that I'm switching to when I change apartments in two months. They offer a combo TV/DSL package that's 5Mbps down normally, and 2Mbps down when you're watching TV. A friend has it, and he says you can't tell the difference. (This is on PAL, which has a higher resolution, but a slightly slower refresh rate than NTSC.)

    If I can stream regular quality content at 3Mbps, by the time we get to 30Mbps and up to the home, this guy's entire premise will be destroyed. I hate to bust his bubble, but the media kiosk has been tried, and tried again. No one's been able to get it to work, and with good reason. There are no consumer electronics players that take a standard format external drive.

    If we could see hard drives that fit the new slot based version of PCIe, this might change (assuming you could get disk-based players like PVRs that use those instead of an internal hard drive), then you could ramp into the market, by providing added functionality to those already in need of disk space (easy upgrades), and service after you had seeded the market.

    • In his rant, he talks about how no one he's run into has ever uploaded or downloaded an HD movie from the net.

      Considering that many of the TV episodes of various series I see online are HD material that's been recompressed with Divx or Xvid or some similar format, I wonder what people he's been talking to...
    • I discovered MP3s in 1995. At the time I had a 486 50, a 2x CD-ROM, and no Internet connection. For me, it was basically just something cool to toy with. I've always been facinated with digital music, and this was just too cool. So I'd spend 15 minutes ripping a 5 minute song, because of all the drive jitter, then another 15 minutes or so to encode. Playback was pretty impractical since I couldn't do it in anything but DOS. The CPU overhead from any multitasking OS was enough that it couldn't playback witho

  • who the hell is Mark Cuban? (Score:5, Informative)

    by jeffy124 ( 453342 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:49PM (#10047887) Homepage Journal
    if you're asking yourself that question, here's a partial answer:

    He's the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. He's looks young, probably in his 30s or early 40s, has tons of money to his name, and is far from the typical millionaire/billionaire stereotype. He's not well liked by the upper NBA execs for frequent criticism of the referees, and has gotten himself fined on numerous occasions since taking ownership of the Mavs a few years ago. He once said he wouldnt trust one of them to operate a Dairy Queen (an ice cream shop in the US), to which DQ said come give it a try (Cuban did do a DQ Manager for a day). I dont think the guy has ever worn a suit in his life. He'll be hosting some reality-type TV show this fall that, from commercials, appears to be a knock off of The Apprentice.
    • But as to why do we care under this Topic, he runs VOOM [voom.com], the HDTV satelite company. As to how he got rich (cribed from askmen.com [askmen.com]
      • Cuban founded MicroSolutions, a computer consulting firm, in 1983, which went on to become a leading National Systems Integrator. By 1990, his company was grossing $30 million per year, but the real payoff came when he sold his company to CompuServe and bagged millions of dollars.

      • Then sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo (Score:5, Interesting)

        by alexhmit01 ( 104757 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @04:06PM (#10048933)
        Made billions... Owns the Mavericks, two television stations (HDNet, and HDNet movies), and is a regular on AVS Forum.

        When I saw him at CES two years ago, talking to his camera crew, because that's what he does, I listened to VPs from major companies just watch him talk and talk to each other about how he is the best thing that ever happened to their industry.

        He has a FORTUNE. He likes HDTV. He bought a local station (so HDNet is available OTA in Dallas), hooked up with DirecTV, and when they had more bandwidth, rolled out HDNet Movies.

        Unfortunately, not all of my HD tastes are the same as his, as HDNet is "whatever Cuban wants to watch."

        This man made a fortune, and is singlehandedly pushing more HD Content than anyone else, because he likes it.

        I'd say he's a good person to recognize.

        Alex
        • He also has an MBA, so he defies that sterotype too. His undergrad degreee is from Indiana and he is a BIG Bobby Knight fan.

          The NBA hates him as he isn't afraid to criticize the referees and the stupid rules. They just fine him what amounts to "chump change" for him. Mav's fans love the man, he brought a decent team (and coach) back to Dallas.

  • What about my television (Score:5, Insightful)

    by twizzlybear ( 795481 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:55PM (#10047949)
    As someone who has worked in and observed the media industry for a while, I have to once again where a lot of these thoughts fall short

    1) People like watching stuff on their television while sitting on their couch. I mean, it's great to talk about all sorts of computer tech being integrated into this and that but at the end of the day, I don't want my darn TV to bluescreen during the superbowl and i'm a heck of a lot more accepting and tolerant of this type of nonsense than most people are

    2) Piracy is a massive issue and will continue to be so long as the studios follow the "ain't broke don't fix" attitude. The moment a tech window opens up, if media isn't delivered to the people in a reasonable format, people will make do. Ie., I won't pay $6 for a quality video on my PC, but if you can deliver me a watchable video on my PC right now for free, hrmmm....

    3) There is a huge dilemma facing all the studios and tech companies as they contemplate the build out of structures to support these types of technologies. I hope Verizon picks up and does some crazy 30 mbps + connection, but at the end of the day, these things take YEARS and YEARS to recoup costs on and without sharing some of that cost with the studios (who benefit most from appropriately developed tech platforms), these rollouts will be MUCH slower than anticipated.

  • Security by Obesity (Score:5, Funny)

    by macz ( 797860 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:55PM (#10047952)

    I thought security by obscurity was the weakest form of digital protection... now I know one worse: Security by Obesity.

    Anyone want to rename some 2 year old DVD-SVCD code to the "fen-fen" algorithm?

  • I took a permanent marker... (Score:5, Funny)

    by darkfus ( 177149 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:56PM (#10047959)
    ...and marked "Cuban" on my DVDs. Now what? Do I wait for the next article for more instructions?

    Is this some quest?
  • Does this mean I will be able to buy the whole season of Bikini Destinations in uncompressed HD quality?

  • heh (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:57PM (#10047969) Homepage Journal
    "He believes that the solution to movie piracy is bigger file formats."

    Umm no.

    1.) Bigger files can be shrunk down. See how an 8 gig DVD gets knocked down to 700 megs.

    2.) This doesn't solve the problem of piracy. It's barely a hurdle. The solution to piracy is making money, not stopping it from happening. There are lots of ways to do that, most of them involve making the product better. I'm perfectly saavy when it comes to watching movies without paying for them. I don't. Why? Because I'm a good honest person? Nah. It's because going to the store and plunking down a few bucks is better than downloading it over a period of several days. Plus I like commentaries etc.

    Don't close doors, open new ones.

  • Bigger file formats don't matter (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @02:57PM (#10047972)
    It doesn't matter if you release everyting in 1080p 90FPS DV files, all it takes is Discreet Media Cleaner and suddenly it's 480p at 30FPS MPEG2. Or VirtualDub with ffmpeg/xvid/theora or whatever.

    It's the classic ratio of disk space versus processor power. The more processor power you have the less disk space you need (As you get better compression with compute-intensive algorithms)

  • Broadband providers already stop piracy... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by slungsolow ( 722380 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:01PM (#10048010) Homepage
    or at least the sharing part..

    They do make it easy to download the movies by giving out 3Mb/s, but they do hinder the sharing of the content by capping ups at 128Kb/s.

    Sure, with the advent of distributed downloads, bit torrent, etc, the bandwidth hit itsn't that big, but its certainly become a hassle to share those 4.7 GB files if it takes you 8 hours to get it and 150 hours to share it.

    • Re:Broadband providers already stop piracy... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:50PM (#10048720) Homepage Journal
      They do make it easy to download the movies by giving out 3Mb/s, but they do hinder the sharing of the content by capping ups at 128Kb/s.

      This may be true where you live, but not everywhere. For example university students often have symmetric connections. Besides, technical limitations are often the reason for asymmetric connections:

      • ADSL is limited to 8M down / 1M up in the spec. One reason behind this is that consumer systems can only transmit at certain limited power into public networks. This regulation has nothing to do with file sharing, its origins go back a long way before P2P.
      • Cable TV was originally intended as a one-way medium. Thus the repeater amplifiers were built one-way. For cable internet, the providers have had to add return capacity into the repeaters, which is not simple or cheap; again the capacity is limited by technology.

      At least here in Finland, several ISPs realize that there are legitimate uses for uploading, and don't treat their customers as drooling consumers. Thus it's possible to get the full rate of ADSL, for example.

  • Bigger file formats? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thephotoman ( 791574 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:02PM (#10048023) Journal
    While this person might be on to something (keep the file too large to be convienently pirated through digital means), it seems counterintiutive to the whole smaller-faster-better-cheaper paradigm that we usually ascribe to technology in general and computers specifically. Furthermore, you'd have to increase quality with that size, or the people will rebel against much larger material costs, not to mention the difficulty of putting such a movie on a removeable medium.

    Basically, the idea is sound, but it probably won't fly without better storage mechanisms.

  • Economies of Scale (Score:5, Insightful)

    by anubi ( 640541 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:03PM (#10048038) Journal
    This is one thing the producers will always have that we will never have, without blatant and provable violation of copyright law.

    The original content producer is the only one who can legally crank out billions of copies of his work.

    So, flood the marketing channels, and make it so easy to buy his work that its not worth the trouble to make one for yourself.

    Kinda like nails. Who would think of trying to make their own, despite any patent protection that might be involved in making nails?

    For most things I buy, the people in the marketing channels have made damn sure its in my best interests to buy the product, even if I could make my own... as they have the tremendous advantage of economy of scale, that by the very laws of nature, I will never have.

    In economics parlance, this is called a "natural monopoly", and does quite well, even without any intervention of rights protection groups.

    We already have laws in place to go after anyone else trying to replicate oopyrighted works on such a scale to make the economics of mass production profitable.

  • Let me put what he's saying into geek-talk (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ignignot ( 782335 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:16PM (#10048158) Journal
    Basically, he's talking about a content distributer using hard drives instead of dvd's to send the content to a customer. Think of this another way - it is a network connection, much like ethernet, where packets of data get sent to customers.

    The comments that I have read seem to be missing his main thrust - why keep to a static transport layer (dvd's) when instead you can have that layer improve in bandwidth as time goes on. While there are some issues with content control, I think he is completely right - dvd's are placing themselves out of the market cost at 20 bucks a pop. 2 years from now, why buy a 5 gb dvd for 20 bucks when you can buy a 20 gb usb keychain drive for the same? This is about flexibility and scalability, something that the current dvd (and the earlier vhs) distribution model do not have. This guy is a genius, and he's got the money to use his idea effectively.

  • Forgets an important factor (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Performer Guy ( 69820 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:18PM (#10048179)
    DVDs cost the industry less than a buck a pop. For the ammount of storage it's dirt cheap. They like it that way, it's like printing money, they're not gonna go for a small electronic gizmo that costs more to manufacture no matter how nifty it is. Ramp up time is important too, as is the time to burn during manufacturing. Have you seen a DVD getting made? It's *fast*, a system to make flashes then write to it would have to be way more parallel to make them in the volumes optical media are. Maybe it's doable but I've got a hunch that it's just more expensive than a stamped plastic sandwitch.

  • RTFB (Score:5, Informative)

    by brutusbuck ( 192303 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:29PM (#10048371)
    Read the F'n Blog

    His whole point is that compact flash drives and hard drive technology is booming right now. More storage in a smaller footprint for a cheaper price. It's far outpacing DVD (the media not the format). His point is that content delivery in the next couple years is going to hard drives (in some form) not to DVDs. At least, that's what he thinks...I agree with him.

    As a SIDENOTE, he mentions the benefit of delivering "really big movies" on "really small hard drives" via mail or rental or whatever is that it's a natural deterrant to internet based file sharing. He thinks buying these really big movie files on really small hard drives will be more cost effective and less of a hassle than creating the infrastructure for a 10x (or 30x) faster internet. Again, over the next 5 years I think he's right.

    It won't stop people from getting pirated content, and he doesn't claim that in his blog.
  • As others have already pointed out, filesize is no deterrent. For the people who don't care about pristine image quality, they will simply re-encode. The others will just wait a year for available bandwidth to catch up.

    Since the purpose of copyright, as defined in the US constitution is, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and overbearing copyright enforcement is begining to have the opposite effect, perhaps it is time to start rethinking the incentive structure to get things back on tra
  • I wonder how long until the record and film industries resign themselves to the fact they will never stop piracy. Sure, they may put on a public front, but they will have to accept that it is now too imbedded in internet culture to stop. They can sue, but it's only a matter of time until a secure p2p network becomes the standard.

    I have no sympathy for the record companies - they were far too slow off the blocks with paid-for downloads and have been fleecing consumers for years. I have different feelin
  • No Clue. The fact that the content is HD quality means nothing to the guy who is downloading movies to watch on his PC (or even burn to disc and watch it on his/her Big Screen 65" Plasma TV). The guy doing the downloading wants to watch the MOVIE. Quality is second or third in priority.

    Lets say, I hypothetically download a movie to watch, and it takes all day to download this movie. It is made from someone sitting in a theater and filming it with Digital Camera in hand....but it was released the same day I am downloading it. Am I going to complain "Damn, the quality of this is poor....and I can hear whomever crunching popcorn in the background....and why is everyone laughing so loud at the screen?" OR am I going to happily watch a new release in the comfort of my PC chair / Home theater system and say "Wow, good movie...have to buy the DVD in 6 months when it gets released" or maybe "Boy...glad I did not waste money on that BOMB".

    If I am going to take the time to download a movie (which in this day and age I can start the d/l and do something else for XX:XX time while it downloads) I am going to be savvy enough to realize compression was used....that its not the same experience as going into a theater, and the quality could be really bad...but at least I won't have to shell out $9.00, fight with the crowds of people, pay exhorbitant prices for popcorn just to watch a movie, AND I can take it wherever I go and watch it whenever I want to. I would be smart enough to realize the trade-off for convenience is compression (Which can result in GOOD quality and bad quality) and use, rather than worry about how the HiDef quality is degraded (hell, I would be watching it on a notebook, home PC, or maybe even a Big Screen if I wanted to burn a disc) and how big the file size is.

    Compression has come a long way, and will continue to be used because IT WORKS 'good enough" for 90% of the population. Especially if the choice is Pay for real or D/L for FREE.

    Heck, he used compression to copy movies to his Flash Drive and enjoyed it so much it sparked this whole essay and erroneous conclusion. Convenience will win over Quality. It has so far....and there are too many examples to site....

  • The Real Worry for Mark Cuban (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is if the Dallas Mavericks can make it past the second round of the playoffs next season. Without Nash it could be a problem.

  • who needs HD quality? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mstamat ( 519697 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:46PM (#10048656)
    A reply from Mark Cuban to a comment of a reader in his blog:
    A compressed DVD 2hour movie can be 900mbs, give or take. A compressed HD 2 hr movie at only Mpeg2/ATSC/1080i equivalency is about 9 GBS, at the low end. Thats 10x.. Do you see upload and download speeds increasing 10x in the next couple years? I dont...
    I suspect brain damage on Mark if he cannot understand that nobody gives a s#1t for HD movies. DVD quality is good enough for most people standards. HD movies are doomed for the very same reason DVD-Audio and Super-Audio-CD are a failure today. Even if MPAA manages somehow to distribute only HD movies, people will happily downgrade them to DVD quality and keep sharing them :-P
  • If noone clues ol' Mark in he might run off to the MPAA with the 'just make the movies a terabyte' business and maybe they'll leave technology the hell alone!

  • HD is about QUALITY (Score:5, Interesting)

    by citiZen2010 ( 802381 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @03:53PM (#10048767)

    There have been a lot of posts so far about how dumb Mark Cuban is because he thinks the solution to piracy is to release content at extremely high bitrates. While it is true that you could transcode HD content to manageable bitrates, you would surely need to decimate the frame size to do so, and when you do that, you're not talking about HD any more. Sure you're still talking about piracy, but once you lose the high definition, Mr. Cuban doesn't worry about it anymore, since the concept of "low resolution" isn't vibrating on his wavelength.

    The main thrust of this blog is talking about how the heck we're going to deliver HD to the home. I think it's laughable that he would consider delivering content on hard disks instead of DVDs... um let's see, the hard disk costs at least 500x to manufacture and is full of moving parts that are likely to fail the more the device is moved around. Oh, and it doesn't slip into a thin envelope like a DVD a la Netflix. Considering flash drives is at least technically feasible, but there, the manufacture cost multiple is even higher and it will be quite a number of years before we have something big enough for an HD TV show, let alone a movie.

    DVDs (and optical media in general) are extremely cheap to manufacture, and very robust. They will last until something even cheaper and more robust comes along, or in the case of IP delivery, the convenience factor is good enough that you can charge the consumer enough to cover the transmission cost and still make a profit.

    Mr. Cuban is foolish to discount VOD. There is no doubt in my mind that by the end of the decade, most people will get their media fix (even HDTV) the instant gratification way, pulling it off the network. Some companies are already providing VOD movies to the PC... see starz.com. PVR and US Postal Service (Netflix) are working as a stopgap until the bandwidth is in place. Nobody wants to piddle around with discs and drives when we can just push a button on our remote.

  • Given a choice all people are not the same (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bobaferret ( 513897 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @04:14PM (#10049055)
    To me the most interesting thing about this articale is the fact that when you give people a choice of a thousand movies, they will tend to get the more obscure things. I know I do. When I look for music on-line, It's not Britney, it's things that I don't hear on the radio or things that are not popular enough for record stores to carry. Same with Movies, I bought one of those 14.99 unlimited things at BlockBuster's and quickly ran thriough all of the new releases, I then found myself renting an obscent amount of foreign films and other things that I would normally waste the moeny one ( as if most new (Big Name) releases are a waste to being with).

  • missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by akb ( 39826 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @04:19PM (#10049123)
    Most of the comments are about the p2p angle, which was hardly the point. The main point of the article was that the DVD format and storage size can only change on rare occassions, whereas flash and hard disk storage sizes are doubling every year. This contrast allows a more flexible business model than sellers of a traditional product like a DVD player can keep up with. Following, he sees a huge market for introducing hard and flash drives, things like vending machines for movies with usb ports.

  • Don't discount Mark Cuban (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mistah Blue ( 519779 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @04:52PM (#10049559)

    This guy is NOT stupid or clueless. He sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for cold hard cash and became a billionaire in the process. He is STILL a billionaire. How many other dot commers can claim that?

    He does what he wants. He has a passion for basketball so he bought the Dallas Mavericks. He takes care of his players (they have an awesome arena to play in that is decked out in technology to include individual DVD players in the locker rooms for each player). He doesn't take crap off the refs or the NBA, and has been fined enough to show it. I respect him for that. He doesn't whine about it.

    While we can nit all day long about what he said in his blog, the upshot is that storage media and capacity are in a high rate of change right now. He is not advocating the status quo, but doing something different. That is his trademark. Discount him at your peril.

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