Mark Cuban's most controversial call: MP3 will Die!
This thing's moving so fast you get dizzy. We'll be following this controversy v-e-r-y closely. Gotta admit, Cuban's got conviction and he's afraid of nobody.
Discuss.
BAM
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MP3 will die, executive predicts
By Loring Wirbel
EE Times
(03/10/99, 5:50 p.m. EDT)
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Streaming media wars will characterize the turn of the century, and MP3 audio formats will be an early casualty, according to Mark Cuban, president and chairman of Broadcast.com Inc. (Dallas). MP3 will not fall victim to the Recording Industry Association of America's attempts at censorship, but will fail because it will not scale as much as streaming media systems from RealNetworks Inc. or Microsoft Corp., Cuban said in a keynote address at the MultimediaCom conference on Wednesday (March 10).
Though MP3 is an open format that does not carry the economic incentive of a proprietary streaming media system, it will not be doomed by its openness or lack of an owner, Cuban said. Rather, its lack of a compression advantage over RealMedia or Microsoft ASF files, plus the fact that it cannot be extended by new developers as software like the Linux OS can, means that developers will not find it attractive.
But recording industry executives should not be smug or complacent about the death of MP3, Cuban warned. Not only is the Secure Digital Music Initiative likely to fail, Cuban said, but the structure of music and film distribution networks will dissolve in less than five years in the face of Web-based distribution. Cuban predicted that the six companies that control film rights distribution, and the five that control CD music distribution, will be either dead or changed beyond recognition by early in the 21st century.
Among streaming media specialists, Cuban predicted RealNetworks Inc. will be acquired within a year, not by a software giant like Microsoft or a traditional media giant, but by a telephone company or specialized carrier that wants to add streaming media capabilities to bandwidth access schemes.
Cuban presented a unique vision of how bandwidth will be metered. He said that downstream high-bandwidth channels like cable-modem QAM or copper xDSL likely will retain their all-you-can-eat, unmetered status, even as customers exceed megabit-per-second rates. However, carriers will turn to usage-based pricing for return-path services, for customers who wish to reserve videoconferencing or upload significant files to the Internet, for example.
And Cuban saw an even more unusual replacement for film and CD distribution. He said that charging customers by downloads of individual songs or movie titles probably will not work, in part because the search space of possible audio and video clips is so huge. Instead, he said, smart record companies will turn to a subscription-based service for a particular artist, in which a monthly fee will allow a select community to receive all new works by an artist for that month. In this model, he predicted, the current "MP3 rebels" who post bootleg live performances to Web sites will be encouraged to join "communities of interest," similar to fan clubs, where they will be given incentives to post semi-legitimate recordings of an artist to a fan group and become part of the more informal licensing structure of the future.
The biggest challenge companies like Broadcast.com will face in the future, Cuban concluded, comes not from media traditionalists or other streaming-media specialists, but from "the little kid effect," stemming from the 10-year-old who invents the next killer app for the Web in order to avoid doing the day's homework.
eet.com |
