Mark Cuban on HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future. Great read, I didn’t know that the HD content they film is higher quality than what they broadcast. I’ve gotten the full HD experience once at a friend’s house who had one of those giant 6 foot TVs and it was amazing, we watched golf and the nature channel or something. The junk they show on the TVs at the stores does not do HD justice at all. Cuban also thinks HD is the answer to piracy, contrast to this interview with Jack Valentini on Engadget.
I think Mark’s enthusiasm has gotten in the way of his good judgment. HD filesize is no barrier to piracy, any more than DVD filesize. A 9GB DVD is too large to distribute online as an MPEG-2, so people downconvert it to something in the 600MB-1.5GB range; why wouldn’t they do the same for HD? The compressed file is better than VHS quality, which is what we all lived with for years. Things might change in a few years, when HDTVs are affordable for the average joe and thus more people are seeing the picture quality limitations of DVDs – but that’s assuming compression technology doesn’t advance as well.
Incidentally, he’s actually downplaying HD filesize. A 90-min film takes up 18gigs in DV format (relatively low-quality, 720×480). I’ve been doing an HD feature, and we exported some FX sequences onto a hard drive in HD format. Five minutes worth took up something like 30-40 gigs.
D, very interesting. I would imagine people wouldn’t want to downgrade things for the same reason I’d rather see Matrix or Hero in theatres rather than on my crappy TV (or computer monitor).
You watch golf??
Size doesn’t matter anymore. Instead of researching for more screensize (which is neat sometimes, I concur) they should concentrate on content. I do not want to see bad movies on a huge TV (because the spent all the money elsewhere). ‘Band of Brothers’, ‘Schindler’s List’ and ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ are great movies not because of their broadcast size. Anyway, they still move me on my crappy TV. 😉
Mark, when you can see the blades of the grass, sure. 🙂
Observer, I agree that the best screen in the world won’t make a bad movie any better. I think they can make old movies HD because I saw an old Western (I think it was Tombstone) in high definition and it was gorgeous. I can’t think of any good analogies, but I think good content will follow the good technology. (Like great writers have gravitated toward the web?)
We have a decent sized HDTV (52″) at home and the picture quality on regular tv can be shocking at that size, and we have very few HD channels (CBS, HBO, ABC and ESPN off the top of my head) on comcast… Once there are more channels broadcasting solely in HD the better we’ll all be. Like, f’rinstance, this year Superbowl was FANTASTIC in HD, I’m looking forward to a season of NFL in HD now. Plus run DVD’s through a composite box for better picture quality
As for HD on PC’s, regular dvd’s are big enough for most people to download as an overnight dedication, anything bigger is (IMHO) a turn off
Though Cuban’s idea of kiosks at airports sounds intruiging to say the least
D, regardless of your ability to downgrade content, how many people are going to download a 18-gig file off the web? Okay, how many normal, socially sane people?
Cuban is right. And when you’re worth 1.3 bil, 30 percent of the HD market, your own basketball team, and have a TV show, you can be right too. 😛
Josh, that’s not what I was saying; no-one would download that without downconverting it first. They’d downconvert it to divx or MPEG4 or what have you.
My point was that an uncompressed HD film would take up hundreds of gigs, not 18. So Cuban’s already talking about some degree of compression.