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To: kemble s. matter who wrote (150290)	1/4/2000 5:39:00 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Hi Kemble! I just read this quote from Mark Cuban. This cover story from Broadcasting and Cable is well worth reading. Leigh "There are no limits to who can compete," Cuban says. "Look at IBM, which was the de facto leader in PCs. Then Compaq came along and then Dell came along. Boom. There's always a prettier business model somewhere." broadcastingcable.com Posted: 12/28/1999 TheMillennavision: THE END By Don West Broadcast.com's Cuban was asked: "Given a five-years-out scenario, what will have happened to broadcast over-the-air TV? What will have happened to cable and satellites?" His answer: "They will be the same. Analog's not going to go away; there will still be TVs. It's not like it's going to disappear. But the alternatives will increase in their penetration and in their impact. You know, there were silent films, then there were talkies, then there was radio and then there was TV. Radio was the dominant medium--who could ever imagine anything bigger or better? Then came TV. Then came cable. "You're going to see a tick up. But the one thing that's the wild card that I think is really cool is that there are going to be new technologies continuously layered on. There are going to be new forms of media entertainment that we don't even know about today. And that's the beauty of this digital world, because you can enable those things to happen. It's not spectrum limited. "Things can change drastically in terms of business opportunities or revenue models," Cuban says. "It is possible that advertising won't be the way content is supported in the future. We see subscription TV. Are there other alternatives? E-commerce is the most obvious, but there could even be other things. You know, digital downloads of things. In a digital world you stop seeing the segregation between physical formats. Downloading music now sold on CDs? Movies are sold in theaters and VHS and DVD. Once they're digital--well, maybe there's a whole different absorption of the user. "Maybe it turns out that you're into mysteries every which way--you want to read `em, you want to watch `em, you want to listen to `em, you want to have `em in your car, and so we make you part of the mystery club and it becomes part of your life style because you're being absorbed into it. And so now to be part of this life style group, you'd pay $19 a month. Part of that is your high-definition TV--you've got the Mystery Channel. And all the mystery novels you could possibly want." Asked to project another 20 or 30 years, Cuban was candid. "I have no idea. If I were going to guess, one supposition is that cable is not the last wire into our homes. There will be wireless, obviously, but there will be more wires as well. And I think it will be an optical fiber that comes to your house and it will be a gigabit or more. And just like you get absorbed in front of your computer, your living environment will become much more absorbing, because with the gigabit you can do a whole lot. And it could be multiple gigabits. It may even be that we're past digital and now we're into optical, which has different rules. "There are no limits to who can compete," Cuban says. "Look at IBM, which was the de facto leader in PCs. Then Compaq came along and then Dell came along. Boom. There's always a prettier business model somewhere." "Competition has a great way of focusing minds toward solutions," says Panasonic's Fannon, "and there's enough residual strength and real potential in every medium to sustain itself while it fights for a decent solution, even if it's an alleged antitrust issue or a statutory bottleneck or a regulatory problem. I don't see the bottom falling out of any medium in the near term, even if the economy goes bad." At the end of the day--whenever that day is--the digital grid will deliver it all. There will be interactive services by the thousands and beautiful pictures whenever they're asked for. What's missing today is the bandwidth and the processing power, but clearly both will come. Neither the consumer nor the industry will compromise video quality and services over the long term. The video evolution and the Web will have created a virtual infinity of content, and a path to the home. Television truly will be a medium of fair market value, with nothing standing between the willing seller and the willing buyer.