Broadcast.com chairman sees upside in DTV
By Brendan Intindola
LAS VEGAS, April 21 (Reuters) -- Broadcast.com Inc.'s chairman said Wednesday
Wall Street sees value in Internet companies, particularly in Broadcast.com and its
merger partner Yahoo!, partly because pervasive, online PCs can easily handle the
growing number of digital television signals.
Broadcast.com, which pulls together audio and video programming from many sources
and transmits over the World Wide Web, and leading Internet portal Yahoo!
announced three weeks ago a stock-swap merger worth over $5 billion.
"You put all these pieces together and you start to understand why, when you look at
the value proposition from the Internet, ... we think Wall Street starts to see some of
these values," Mark Cuban, Broadcast.com chairman, president and co- founder, told
an audience assembled here for the National Association of Broadcasters annual
meeting.
He said the "conventional wisdom" that it will take years for digital television to rise to
meaningful viewer penetration is wrong.
"It is not going to be three, five, 10, 20 years before DTV starts to take hold. It is going
to start to take hold this year, but it won't be on your TV set" it will be on the household
or office PC equipped to handle the digital formats, he said.
As early as the second half of this year, Cuban predicted, the home PC will evolved into
a device akin to audio-visual equipment rather than office gear, speeding the PC-TV
convergence and giving rise to new revenue models for Internet and media companies,
such as quickly growing electronic commerce.
"Well everyone says, 'Who is going to watch TV on their PC?.' The reality is the only
reason you wouldn't watch DTV on your PC is because it looks like a PC," Cuban said.
"Imagine if that PC, which now has a card capable of reading DTV signals, looked like
a DVD (digital video disk) player," he said "Now it looks like it belongs in your living
room."
He said such a "box" would cost about $1,600, and possess all the functions of a PC,
DVD, traditional analog TV tuner, DTV receiver, while hooked to the Internet with a
high-speed cable modem for two-way multimedia flow.
By the second half of 1999, he said consumers will have access to these PCs, looking
like DVDs or VCRs, and by summer 2000 Cuban said expects DTV decoder cards
will be just another prepackaged PC feature. "You won't ask for it, you won't think you
are buying DTV capability, it will just be there," he said.
Cuban also said he expects an explosion in user-generated content on the Internet. "We
think that over the next two years, one of the biggest phenomenons will be
user-generated content" like home movies.
For traditional broadcasters, the cost of digital-video creation is "dropping like a rock,
and it is happening on the consumer side as well." |
