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Web Video Doubter Mark Cuban Invests in Web Video Studio Revision3

Peter Kafka — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:01:37 +0000

Mark Cuban, Web video skeptic? Meet Mark Cuban, Web video investor.

The voluble entrepreneur and investor, who made his fortune off Web video during the first Internet boom, is dabbling in it again: He has put money into Revision3, the Web video studio/network best known as the home of Diggnation.

The investment was part of a small round of funding Revision3 raised last year, which it hasn’t disclosed until now.

That wouldn’t be that noteworthy, except that Cuban, again and again, has argued that ever-rising expectations for Web video were overblown, and that the technology wouldn’t displace TV. Which happens to be where Cuban is betting heavily, via his HDNet network.

A very brief summary of his argument: Internet infrastructure can’t support TV-scale viewing; Web advertising can’t support TV-scale programming; people like TV.

And some representative blog posts where he make his case: The Great Internet Video Lie; Why Do Internet People Think Content People Are Stupid?; The Future of TV Is…TV.

And here’s a representative counter-argument: Cable TV Is Screwd. It was written two years ago, by Cuban’s new partner, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback.

So what gives? Is Cuban finally backing down? Not at all, the billionaire says. He’s merely investing in a potential source of content for his TV network.

The dollars he’s putting into Revision3 will give him what amounts to a first look on the video site’s programming, and the chance to turn some of it into TV shows.

“I think Jim can make some money from this. I don’t throw money away,” Cuban says via email. “But this investment really confirms my position on web video. While Revision3 will make some money on the web, the real money is [in] TV. And I wanted HDNet to have the option to be that outlet.”

Louderback, for his part, seems fine with a less than total endorsement of his industry–he’s the one highlighting Cuban’s investment. “I like to think that we’re doing some pretty innovative stuff, and [the investment] gives him a broader visibility into that space”, he says.

And since Revision3 won’t say how much money Cuban invested in the company, or the total size of the round–Louderback will only say that it was “relatively immaterial” for his company–it’s impossible to gauge what any of this really means from the outside.

In related can’t-really-judge-what-this-means news: Revision3 says its revenue, which it won’t disclose, grew 80 percent last year, and that the company turned a profit in Q4 of 2010. Louderback defines profitable in this instance as “EBIDTA-profitable,” and says his company should be “solidly in the black” by the middle of this year.

Ready for 3-D Web Video? Break Media Is Serving It Up Anyway

Peter Kafka — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:00:45 +0000

Sometimes marketers come late to a trend. Sometimes they show up early, panting and desperate to write checks.

Such is the case with 3-D, says Keith Richman, who is happy to help them out.* Richman’s Break Media, the dude-centric Web site network, is launching a 3-D Web video channel aimed at advertisers who want to connect themselves with anything 3-D right now. Oh, and people who want to watch 3-D Web video on their TVs and PCs, too.

How many of the latter group are there? Who knows. Can’t be that many, for the time being. But certain brands, like Dell’s (DELL) Alienware, which makes game-centric PCs, are happy to pay up for 3-D content, so Break is happy to make it for them. A sample:

Unknown Title – Watch more free videos

Richman says 3-D video is about 300 percent more expensive to make than run-of-the-mill Web video, because the equipment is expensive and the talent pool that knows how to use it is limited. Cameras for 3-D, at least, will get cheaper within the next few months, but this stuff will be pricey for some time.

If 3-D joins Laserdiscs and Betamax in the great technology graveyard in the sky, then that’s wasted money for Richman and his sponsors. But if he’s right, the payoff is something like the one that HDNet’s Mark Cuban got for betting early on that technology about five years ago: A big head start on something that everyone now takes for granted.

*I’m paraphrasing, of course–Richman is much too politic to describe marketers as “desperate.” I’m sure he said “enthusiastic” or something like that.

HDNet Chairman Mark Cuban: The Full D7 Session

Kara Swisher — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:30:50 +0000

What can one say about Mark Cuban that he can’t say himself?

Not much, as you will see from this sassy onstage interview he did with Walt Mossberg and me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, where he talked about everything from the idiots of the Internet to the subsidization of Web video by Google (GOOG) to the next big innovation.

Cuban hardly needs an introduction–he’s been a Web mogul, an entrepreneur, a sports team owner, a blogger, a theater owner, a high-definition evangelist and most of all, a digital gadfly.

Here’s the full D7 video session:

[ See post to watch video ]

HDNet Chairman Mark Cuban: The Full D7 Session

Kara Swisher — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:19:44 +0000

What can one say about Mark Cuban that he can’t say himself?

Cuban hardly needs an introduction–he’s been a Web mogul, an entrepreneur, a sports team owner, a blogger, a theater owner, a high-definition evangelist and most of all, a digital gadfly.

Here’s the full D7 video session:

[ See post to watch video ]

More Mark Cuban (Trapped in the Green Room at D7 with BoomTown and the Flip Video Camera)!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:05:24 +0000

Last week, Walt Mossberg and I interviewed entrepreneur, high-definition television fanboy, dancing fool and reliable gadfly Mark Cuban at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

Cuban, who sold his start-up Broadcast.com to Yahoo (YHOO) at the peak of the Web 1.0 bubble for billions, has been using that haul to do a lot of stuff.

In September 2001, the innovative Cuban launched HDNet, a provider of high-definition news, entertainment and sports programming. In January of 2000, he also used all those bucks to buy the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise. He’s also co-owner of Landmark Theaters, Magnolia Pictures, and Rysher Entertainment, and holds a stake in Lions Gate Entertainment.

Cuban also made a laudable effort on the television dance competition, “Dancing With the Stars.”

After our onstage interview (highlights of that video are also below), BoomTown also got him to be more specific about his thoughts on a variety of things he discussed, including Google (GOOG) and its underwriting of its YouTube video subsidiary, HD TV, the problems with broadband and the Internet as a “utility.”

(And don’t miss his cheeky new post on his Blog Maverick site–“Who Cares What People Write?”–about ignoring, well, what some “amateur outtie” bloggers say most of the time.)

Cuban in the Green Room at D7:

[ See post to watch video ]

Cuban Onstage:

[ See post to watch video ]

D7 Video: Mark Cuban

Beth Callaghan — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:07:00 +0000

Mark Cuban, outspoken HDNet Chairman and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a few strong ideas about start-up culture, basketball and business models for making money from online content–and he’s been sharing them for a long time. Wonder if he still thinks “only a moron” would invest in YouTube.

[ See post to watch video ]

D7 Interview: Mark Cuban

Peter Kafka — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:33:26 +0000

Mark Cuban was lucky enough to make billions on Internet video during the Web 1.0 bubble and smart enough to cash out before it burst. He’s spent a bunch of that money on high-profile purchases like a basketball team and a Gulfstream. But much of his investment and energy since then has been directed… away from Web video and toward conventional video, in the form of movies and television.

Cuban’s portfolio companies make movies and television shows and distribute them to movie theaters and television sets. And he’s been loudly skeptical about the possibilities of Web video outlets like YouTube–around the time that Google plunked down $1.6 billion on the site, he declared that “only a moron” would want to invest in it. Time to see if he still feels the same way.

Highlight Video

[ See post to watch video ]

Live Blog

Everyone says video on the Internet is great, but we spend 99 percent of our time watching TV, and that’s in large part because of HD TV.
Walt: 99 percent?
Mark: Well, I don’t know. But it’s a lot.
Kara: Talk about Internet video. How do you look at it? Mark: It’s a real disappointment to see how far Internet video has come. We were working on hotspots, advertising standards, multicasting 10 years ago. Nothing happened. You can go on and on and on.
Walt: Why is that? Mark: I have no idea. If you say one thing, it’s that when Google (GOOG) bought YouTube, they didn’t think about making money right away; the focus was on ubiquity, and because no one paid attention, that’s what happened. Now you can’t fight them; it’s like Microsoft (MSFT). You can’t do anything on video these days unless you work with YouTube.
There are no hits on the Web. So the only way it works is if you can create a platform like YouTube. Hulu could do that, but they have big pockets to appease.
Kara: No hits? Mark: There are hits. But they’re one-off hits. On TV, there’re hits, but they’re wrong 95 percent of the time, and there are 300-plus competitors. On the Internet, there are unlimited competitors, and YouTube subsidizes bandwidth. So the real cost is marketing. How do you stand out?

Mark: Video for the Web has become a testing ground for mediums that actually have revenue.
Kara: So what would the model have been had you bought YouTube? Mark: Like I said, I wouldn’t have bought it. They hid behind the DMCA, and they have huge copyright problems, and it’s a disaster waiting to happen. We still don’t know what’s going to happen with the Viacom (VIA) suit. And they’re paying for all that bandwidth.
Mark: And by the way, if anything happens to Google, what happens to the whole video space? Everything gets flipped on its head. If you have to pay for it, maybe your kids stop posting videos of their bands.
Discussion of bandwidth that I’m not catching entirely. But essentially, Mark is saying that the cable companies will have new bandwidth to play with, but they’re not going to necessarily hand it over to the Internet. So everyone in this room is trying to create all these apps and services to shove through one pipe, and the cable guys aren’t going to give them more room.
Kara: Where do you see TV going? Mark: Television means different things now. Broadcast is one thing. Cable is another, and that’s healthy, because of that subscription business, and they’re never going to give up those subscription dollars for Internet nickels. We need to remember that the Internet is a staid platform. There has been very little innovation. It’s like the ’80s, when we were fighting between different word processing software. There’s only evolution, not revolution. But TV… you could have real innovation there.
Kara: We’ve been hearing promises of innovation and interactivity for a long time. Mark: There’s been a problem with standards, and that needs to get fixed.
Walt still wants to watch “Star Trek” on demand. When will that happen? Mark correctly points out that this is partly a programming issue, partly a technology issue. Tech is “easy.” Programming and windows are another story.
Kara: OK. What do you think about the Internet? Yahoo?
Mark: Yahoo (YHOO), Google, MySpace, Facebook, they’re all the same: “One hit and a lot of decent products that are second, third, fourth place, and living off the gravy train.” That’s been the tradition since Microsoft and Windows. They’re all the same.
Kara: Twitter? Mark: The problem with them isn’t a business model. They have 10,000 ways to make money, and everyone in this room can come up with one. They’re just having fun and teasing you guys. I told Facebook, via Jim Breyer, that all those real names they provide via Facebook Connect–that they should charge for it. I think Twitter has similar possibilities.
Walt points out that people do pay for some Web video, like baseball. Mark: Yup. I’m not saying you can’t have some number of Web users having a great experience. But there’s a limit to the number of people that can be there because there’s limited space, too congested. It’s like having a nice car on the 405. At a certain point it doesn’t matter how nice the car is, because there’s too much traffic. It’s like what Warren Buffet says: First come the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots. Also: “There’s always going to be someone trying to rush the fat kid to the buffet.”
Discussion of tiered pricing. Going to have it on mobile, and we should have the same thing on the Internet. What about content? Yes, we have that already.
Kara and Walt: Tell us about your fight with the SEC? Mark: No. [Pause] “When someone in the government wants you, it’s not a good place to be. You don’t want to be someone’s skin on the wall.” Kara: “Do you know how it’s going to turn out”? Mark: “Yes.”
Mark walks through how he inverts/breaks/changes traditional windows when it comes to movies, VOD, etc. Very interesting. Will have to come back to it, unfortunately.
Walt: Does the Internet help you run your basketball team? Mark: Yup: We watch video of prospects on YouTube. I follow free agent prospects on Twitter. I can accumulate information on searches, the real-time net is very helpful for the Mavericks. My Icerocket engine helps me track down info.
Q&A: What do you think of 3-D? Mark: I think it has a great future. Cost is coming down, it’s a differentiated experience. We can put a huge digital screen in American Airlines Center and do 3-D with glasses. Screens are getting so big and prices are falling so quickly that people are changing the way they consume entertainment, and 3-D is a big part of that.
Gary Shapiro from CEA has a confusing question. Ah. What should we do with the broadcast TV spectrum since 90 percent of people have cable? Mark: We should sell it.
Kara wants investment tips. Mark talks about various start-ups he’s in, like some sort of mobile/SMS play. But I tell people who are in college today or 10 years from now that are going to look at the Internet and laugh. I think where it’s at is technology geared toward personal health. Walt: Are you investing? Mark: Looking. The problem is I don’t understand any of this stuff.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Welcome to Lucky D7: Still Gambling on the Digital Future

Kara Swisher — Mon, 04 May 2009 07:26:10 +0000

Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.

Both have been onstage many times over the years, including a historic interview the pair of tech titans did together in 2007 at D5.

Other amazing speakers have included: Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE), Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp (IACI), legendary director George Lucas, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer, Walt Disney (DIS) honcho Bob Iger, Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), CBS (CBS) CEO Les Moonves, Democratic and Republican pols like former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John McCain, all the leadership of Google (GOOG) and many, many more.

We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.

But, like the digital industry and the innovation our conference focuses on, we also like to lean forward to try to figure out what the Next Big Thing is around the corner, whether it comes from Silicon Valley or not.

That’s why we’re kicking off our conference on May 26 with two of the founders of Twitter–Biz Stone and Evan Williams–who are riding high on tech’s latest hot thing, which might turn out to be either a rocket ship or a shooting star.

They’ll be followed up over the next two days by a plethora of interesting players, from the leaders of several major mobile companies to content execs hit hard by fast-moving digital forces to a new Internet leader like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, who is trying to turn around one of the Web’s great icons from its more recent lackluster path.

And, as we always do, we will be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.

In the past, the D stage has seen the debut of start-up products like Sling Media’s Slingbox, Aliph’s Jawbone and Pure Digital’s Flip, all of which have gone onto glory. And also some, like Palm’s Foleo, which did not.

While not everyone can attend D, our crack staff is committed to bringing all the action from this year’s conference to readers of the All Things Digital site via up-to-the-minute blogs, photos, videos, tweets, digs and more. We’ll also, as soon as we can, post the videos of each of the onstage sessions, in their entirety.

Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers, below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009′s D7 conference:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)

Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla

Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft

Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo

Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures

Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day

Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia (NOK)

Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIMM)

John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla

John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation (LCAPA)

Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners

Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.

Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm (PALM)

Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T (T)

Biz Stone | Co-founder of Twitter

Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace

Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post (WPO)

Evan Williams | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter

Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal (GE)

Welcome to Lucky D7: Still Gambling on the Digital Future

Kara Swisher — Mon, 04 May 2009 07:15:55 +0000

Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.

Both have been onstage many times over the years, including a historic interview the pair of tech titans did together in 2007 at D5.

We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.

And, as we always do, we will be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.

Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers, below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009′s D7 conference:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)

Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla

Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft

Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo

Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures

Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day

Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia (NOK)

Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIMM)

John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla

John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation (LCAPA)

Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners

Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.

Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm (PALM)

Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T (T)

Biz Stone | Co-founder of Twitter

Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace

Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post (WPO)

Evan Williams | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter

Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal (GE)

The Sweet, Sweet Irony of Mark Cuban and Yahoo

Kara Swisher — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:25:21 +0000

Of the amazingly Internet-experience-free board that billionaire investor Carl Icahn has proposed to replace Yahoo’s current directors in this proxy fight, there is one name who does have a lot of Web-related experience, especially with regards to Yahoo (YHOO).

Specifically, in how to make bank from Yahoo’s desperation.

That would be entrepreneur and all-around bon vivant Mark Cuban (he is pictured here at our first D: All Things Digital conference in 2003), who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in the heady days of 1999 for $5.7 billion in Yahoo stock.

It was a huge deal at the time, with Yahoo engaged in an arms war with other Internet companies like Excite (remember them?), AOL (TWX) and others.

In an acquisitions frenzy, it grabbed Broadcast.com, which was started in 1992 as AudioNet, with Cuban and others in charge.

Broadcast.com was one of the nascent efforts to broadcast online, focusing on radio-like content on the Web, largely using sports and other live events.

It had one of those typical Web 1.0 faux-blockbuster IPOs in 1998 and then, as the stock began to decline, sold quickly to Yahoo a year later.

Right before, as it turned out, the whole bubble burst.

But Cuban and his cohorts made their scratch and were soon gone from Yahoo.

Cuban, sensing the end was nigh, also dumped his Yahoo shares before the decline. And, armed with a fortune, he began his fun foray into a range of businesses, from sports teams to movie theaters to his HDNet, a high-definition cable network.

And, of course, the private jets and entertaining courtside antics and working at the Dairy Queen!

And, also of course, most of Broadcast.com’s assets are useless to Yahoo today.

Now, Cuban is back knocking at Yahoo’s door as an invader, the only major Internet figure apparently willing to turn on the iconic Yahoo CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang.

Calling Benedict Arnold!

I don’t blame Cuban, actually, although Yang surely will be angry over his presence on the Icahn board.

There was always a level of rancor within Yahoo about Cuban, because he sold Broadcast.com at the top, traded out of Yahoo shares at the top and then simply sat back and watched it all as a billionaire gadfly.

BoomTown used to even tease Yang about how Cuban was richer than he was and got to have all the fun. It would always get a glare out of him.

So too could Cuban, as in this post from his smart Blog Maverick (of course, it is named that!) blog, right after Microsoft’s (MSFT) unsolicited bid for Yahoo,.

In it, Cuban urged Yang to sell to the Internet giant, largely due to the pressure of competing with Google (GOOG).

Cuban wrote:

Building a world class Yahoo to be the best company it possibly can be using the management skills that Jerry and company have is a far different challenge than optimizing the stock price. Particularly when Google is your stock comp…

Which is exactly why Jerry and David should sell to MSFT…

So the question isn’t whether Yahoo should sell. It should. The only question is what the structure of the deal should look like so that Jerry and David can achieve many of the goals they set out to accomplish on the net under the MSFT umbrella. Jerry definitely is about customers first. This is his chance to show it…

So Yahoo should say yes. It’s less about the money than about finally achieving the corporate goals set out more than a decade ago. One time Jerry told me that Yahoo stood for You Always Have Other Options. This time Yahoo doesn’t, but their customers options could improve exponentially if Yahoo says yes.”

Given the Yahoo acquisition of Broadcast.com gave the clever Cuban the billions he has used so entertainingly, it’s all kind of ironic, no?