Ochocinco (old-timers may remember when he went by the name Chad Johnson) sent this one out about an hour before a preseason game against the Philadelphia Eagles:

Followed by this one, tapped out during the game itself:

By my count (contractions are tricky), those two missives contain a total of 48 words, which puts Ochocinco’s tab at $520 a word. Which means he trumps Mark Cuban’s $510 per-word Twitter fine he got from the NBA a year ago.

And Ochocinco is sorry. Sort of. Because tweeting is great, but exotic luxury cars are expensive:

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.

Check out this chart from Nielsen (click to enlarge), which tells us that the average American household has nearly three televisions. In 1990, the average was two sets per home.

What gives? Mark Cuban, who has been consistently bearish on Web video–except for the part where he convinced Yahoo (YHOO) to buy Broadcast.com for billions–says the answer is easy: “Consumers have made their choice to spend money on new HDTVs. Why? Because they want to watch TV.”

And it’s probably good to remind the early-adopter set–like people who read this site–that sating all your video needs with computers and “over the top” solutions is going to be a niche behavior for a long time.

But! There is a cake-and-eat-it answer here too: It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that most people will watch TV on their HDTVs. And then, when it makes sense, they’ll watch some video delivered over the Web on those same sets.

That’s already happening in real numbers. Netflix (NFLX) says nearly eight million people are watching TV and movies via its streaming video service, and not all of them are watching on small screens.

Nintendo, for instance, says one million of its customers are using the Netflix service. And by definition, none of them are watching on a PC or laptop; if you’re using a Nintendo Wii, you’re using a TV.

These numbers will increase as more Americans walk out of Best Buy (BBY) and Walmart (WMT) with an Internet-connected TV, whether they planned to buy one or not.

Over the next few years, it will become increasingly hard to buy a set that doesn’t have an ethernet connection, just as you have to go out of your way today not to buy an HD set. And that’s when things are going to get really interesting.

Here are two quotes that got me thinking about what would happen if Facebook–whose user base is inexorably marching toward 400 million–ever got serious about the news aggregation business.

First, perpetual apple-cart-upsetter Mark Cuban raised everyone’s hackles this week by taking aim at online sites that aggregate news from other sources, especially Google (GOOG).

Among other colorful things Cuban said during a keynote speech:

“Google is a vampire, and you run scared. There is no reason to be indexed in Google….You haven’t gotten anything back except that you’ve turned into zombies….You’ve got to realize they’re vampires and you can’t be the dumb blonde showing your neck.”

Then, yesterday, in a fourth-quarter earnings call, AOL (AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong, answering a question about the renewal status of its search deal with Google, talked about how other outlets, especially Facebook, are now more important than ever to getting traffic for his company’s content.

“Our strategy on distribution is not relying on search,” said Armstrong. “Fragmentation is our friend.”

It was a curious way of putting it, but the message was clear and correct–it will be increasingly obvious that consumers are inevitably moving away from the only-search paradigm to that of discovery through social and other jacked-up affiliation networks.

Of course, this puts a site like Facebook in the catbird seat, given that vast seas of rich data flow through it all the time.

In fact, Facebook is already one of the bigger sources of traffic to media sites, behind just Google, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO).

That’s because, at any given moment, Facebook users are trading bazillions of links to articles, blogs, videos, photo images and more, pointing the way to their friends in a giant did-you-see-this mosh pit.

While this is dispersed widely all over the social networking service–on the Wall, on fan pages, in email, in comments–one has to wonder what would happen if Facebook ever decides to start corralling the information with some kind of aggregation method.

Could it pick the most linked and emailed stories of the day? Could it select the most popular photos? Could it tell you accurately what its little slice of humanity was buzzing about on a minute-by-minute basis?

Of course it could, but as more of a new sparkly “Twilight” vampire than the scary old-time one Cuban described.

Not that it will. I once queried Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about the idea that Facebook could make some sort of newfangled competitor to the still-powerful Yahoo News.

No, she replied pretty flatly, noting that the whole service was already about people sharing all kinds of news and information with their friends.

But, it is clear to me, that–much as Google moved into the automated new business–Facebook could do the same anytime it wants to and create what would probably be one of the top aggregation sites for any topic on the Web.

The Silicon Valley phenom certainly could not be as easily de-indexed as Google by worried media companies, because the skeins of information are so enmeshed that separating them is impossible. And why would you?

In his speech, Cuban urged traditional media creators to stop the aggregation madness.

“Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”

In a deeply socially connected world though, it’s a very different story. And in that world, vampires really do live forever.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Rob Glaser (pictured here) called BoomTown when he landed in Washington, D.C., only a few hours after he announced Wednesday he was stepping down as longtime CEO of RealNetworks (RNWK).

Digital Daily reported there was some contention between Glaser and the Real board around his departure from the Seattle-based company he founded 16 years ago, a move that has actually been in the works for some time.

While Glaser did say that he had been through the “most intense two weeks of my life,” leading up to that, he declined to comment more about the specifics of his leaving.

That was fine with me, because–although execs come and go in various and sundry ways–you simply have to give Glaser credit for his pioneering work in bringing both audio and video to the Web.

So Glaser and I talked about this and more, from what he thinks are the key highlights of his Internet career until now to what he plans to do next.

First and foremost, Glaser did “give the Internet a voice,” as I wrote in a 1998 profile of him for The Wall Street Journal about his company’s introduction of its first RealAudio product:

“RealAudio was greeted with more than a little disdain from the Internet elite because it was a tinny and unsatisfying experience for most users. But it gave the Internet a voice, and Mr. Glaser kept plugging away, improving fidelity and striking deals with more content providers to use it on their Web sites.”

Glaser said that was the simple idea behind Real, to “turn the Web from text and static links to a dynamic media space for the mainstream to enjoy.”

That effort began in earnest in the mid-1990s, he noted, by selling “tech enablement,” which simply meant hawking servers and software to companies interested in adding audio and, later, video, to their Web sites.

So successful was Real then that many big companies tried to buy it for huge sums. But ever the aggressive entrepreneur, Glaser never sold–unlike Mark Cuban at Broadcast.com–although many wished he had.

But that was simply not his style, he said; plus, business was booming and it was “like selling pickaxes during the Gold Rush.”

It is an apt metaphor since the next major moment for the company came when the Web 1.0 bubble burst in 2000.

“A lot of great–and also not so great–companies just died,” he said.

To avoid that fate, “We pivoted in a hard way to consumer services and avoided the tailspin,” Glaser added. “It was kind of like when the woolly mammoth evolved into an elephant, while the pterodactyl did not turn into anything.”

That meant creating a variety of consumer-focused media offerings that used Real technology, such as its casual games business and its Rhapsody music service.

Real also shifted its tech licensing business to a carrier services model, Glaser said.

He regularly tangled with Microsoft (MSFT), where he started his career as a very brash 21-year-old. The software giant targeted Real’s business, but also cooperated with the company at times.

And, while the games unit and Rhapsody hit some major bumps, Real did score a whopping $761 million antitrust settlement in 2005 from Microsoft.

But that win was some time ago, and Real idled too much, as did its stock, in the following years, even as Glaser plugged away at creating a variety of new businesses and strategies.

Some were off limits, he said when I asked him why he did not come up with a service like YouTube, given Real’s advantages in video early on, noting that his public company could never had created a service that so antagonized Hollywood partners.

But Glaser did just that more recently with one such innovative idea for a “legal” DVD ripper, called RealDVD.

Though very interesting, RealDVD hit the skids quickly when a federal judge last week dismissed Real’s claims against Hollywood studios seeking to shut down the service before it could be widely distributed.

While that specific defeat was not the reason for his leaving RealNetworks, the idea that it was time to bring new blood to the company finally gained traction with investors, the board, employees and, yes, Glaser too.

What the notoriously hard-charging executive–“My intensity sometimes manifested itself in less positive ways,” Glaser conceded in my 1998 interview with him–will do next is anyone’s guess.

Including his own.

Glaser noted that he would remain chairman of Real, although his day-to-day engagement there is now over.

“It is a big transition for me, because I am closing a chapter I have been in for a very long time,” he said, adding that he would probably do more philanthropic and political work.

(That’s no surprise. After all, Real was once called Progressive Networks, after his liberal politics, and Glaser once had a newspaper column called “What’s Left” while at Yale University.)

Glaser said that on the flight to Washington he thought about the advice Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, one of Real’s earliest investors, gave him when he left Microsoft and was thinking about his next step:

You should take time to figure out what you want to do next and know why you want to do it. Because if it’s successful, once you get going you won’t have time to think through those issues as clearly as you can now.

That’s pretty much been Glaser’s modus operandi over his many years at Real and in the larger Internet space: He pushed his vision of a live Internet forth, he never cut and ran, he never sold, he kept pushing forward.

And you have to admire that kind of gumption, no matter the outcome.

In any case, it is likely Glaser will keep doing so in the years to come.

In fact, pointing out that the movement of entertainment and content online has “come a long way, but still has an even longer way to go,” Glaser started rattling off ideas about where the online media sector needs to go in exactly the same fashion I described a dozen years before.

I described Glaser then as: “speaking in staccato bursts and radiating so much intensity that his face resembles a clenched fist.”

In other words, for all the the lively entrepreneur has been part of as a key pioneer in the development of the Internet, some things will never ever change.

If you want to see Glaser in action, check out these three videos of him, two from the fifth D: All Things Digital conference and one of him talking to me about RealDVD when he introduced it at Demo:

Session interview at D5

Demoing RealPlayer 11 at D5

Talking about RealDVD

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100115/realnetworks-rob-glaser-talks-about-giving-the-internet-a-voice-and-yes-woolly-mammoths/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100108/ces-mark-cuban-on-3-d-hd-lsd/ http://allthingsd.com/20100108/ces-mark-cuban-on-3-d-hd-lsd/#comments Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:03:06 +0000 Lauren Goode http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=19934 Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban is in Las Vegas to take a look at all the technology that’s being showcased this week at CES. He sat down with The Journal to talk about which gadgets he’s looking forward to seeing, why he thinks 2-D-to-3-D video processors are a “cheat,” and what exactly he was thinking when he compared 3-D to LSD.

The Wall Street Journal: What are you looking forward to seeing at CES this year?

Mr. Cuban: Anything 3-D-related, anything cellphone-related, but I’m particularly interested in seeing what types of products are being made for interactive television. Also, I’m curious what companies’ plans are for DTV spectrum, what happens if the FCC takes it back, what if they don’t take it back, and what kind of opportunities that would present.

I always like to walk through the small booths, just to see if there’s something that surprises me. Maybe they couldn’t afford a big booth, but they have something really interesting. I won’t spend a ton of time going through the big ginormous companies other than to visit friends.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100108/ces-mark-cuban-on-3-d-hd-lsd/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091015/advertisers-call-for-a-do-over-on-ftc-blogger-rules/ http://allthingsd.com/20091015/advertisers-call-for-a-do-over-on-ftc-blogger-rules/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:45:46 +0000 Amy Schatz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=16662 Online advertisers joined the blogger backlash against the Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines that require bloggers, Twitterers and others to disclose any cash or freebies they’ve received to hawk stuff online.

Noting the new guidelines have created a “firestorm of controversy within the ad-supported interactive-media industry,” Interactive Advertising Bureau President Randall Rothenberg suggested the FTC rescind the new guidelines.

“These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinguish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered,” he wrote in an open letter to the FTC on Thursday. The online-advertising trade group suggested the FTC try a do-over, after opening up the issue for discussion with bloggers and online advertisers…

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091015/advertisers-call-for-a-do-over-on-ftc-blogger-rules/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090810/marc-cuban-makes-the-best-point-of-all-about-charging-for-content-use-you-imagination/ http://allthingsd.com/20090810/marc-cuban-makes-the-best-point-of-all-about-charging-for-content-use-you-imagination/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:17:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17205

Yesterday–in a somewhat rambling but also riveting blog post about charging for content–serial entrepreneur and perennial gadfly Mark Cuban made a very important point that execs at every large media company should take to heart as they try to cope with the digital challenge.

Use your noggins, why dontcha?

Cuban aimed the piece at News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch, who has been the most vocal media mogul of late about the issue of getting paid online for the copious amount of original content the various parts of the media giant he runs make.

(Such as this site, which is owned by Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp.)

“Rupert, you didn’t ask my opinion on this, but since when has that ever stopped me,” wrote Cuban in his post titled “My Advice to Fox & MySpace on Selling Content–Yes You Can.” “First the good news. You can sell content on the internet. People pay for content on and off the internet every second of every day. It’s easy to do. If you do it right.”

Then, Cuban followed up with a long series of suggestions–in general, Cuban had more interesting ideas in one post than I have collectively heard in a while.

Like all good brainstorms, some are defensive moves, some offensive, some very interesting and some probably unworkable.

But, in this time of massive change, all are well worth considering because Cuban’s piece had the feel of throwing a whole bunch of ideas on the table and just knocking anything around–with the goal of creating a more important sense of discovery and entrepreneurialism.

It’s kind of like that great scene in the movie, “Apollo 13,” when the engineers had to come up with a solution for a dire problem, so they threw a pile of doodads on the table and started tinkering fast.

I dearly hope that is precisely what’s going on inside all the various media companies as they seek to maneuver the storm-tossed seas of change they find themselves in instead of the more typical inclination to throw blame in a time of crisis.

The problem, as it always turns out, is that industries in trouble always tend to shoot down ideas as they arise rather than embrace even the truly insane ones–one of which might turn out to be the innovation needed.

As Cuban correctly pointed out, that is often due to infighting at big corporations.

To the negative, I saw that up close and personal a half-dozen years ago as AOL was systematically dismembered at Time Warner (TWX), due to very real wounds from the disastrous merger, at the exact moment when everyone should have been pulling for it.

To the positive, it is clear that the many failings of Microsoft (MSFT) in the search game were what finally got it to take a greenfields approach with its recently announced Bing, which is finally a competitive product.

I like that kind of gumption, and it was nice to see that in just one blog post Cuban could come up with at least 10 ideas, many of which would doubtlessly not fly.

In fact, after one, Cuban wrote: “I don’t know if it will work, but it is sure worth exploring!”

It sure is.

Here is that clip from “Apollo 13,” as well as the full video of the interview Walt Mossberg and I did with the voluble Cuban on the issues facing media giants at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in May:

Apollo 13

Cuban at D7

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090810/marc-cuban-makes-the-best-point-of-all-about-charging-for-content-use-you-imagination/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090717/mark-cuban-beats-the-sec-judge-tosses-insider-trading-case/ http://allthingsd.com/20090717/mark-cuban-beats-the-sec-judge-tosses-insider-trading-case/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:53:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9415

A federal judge has dismissed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider-trading case against Mark Cuban, the AP reports. Astonishingly, Cuban has yet to say anything about this on his blog or his Twitter account. But I assume that will be rectified shortly.

UPDATE: That took a while–nearly two hours by my estimate. But here’s Cuban’s initial post-court Tweet (click to enlarge):

At the D7 conference in May, Cuban declined to talk about the case, which revolved around allegations that he dumped shares he owned in search engine Mamma.com after learning of a secondary offering. But even his noncomment was interesting. From my transcript of his  interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg:

“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.’”

Here’s a highlight reel of the interview; you can see the entire session here.

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