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Online video firms target small video publishing companies
The outspoken Mark Cuban told a crowd at MIT last night that the amount of video content on either the Internet or TV is going to explode and drive innovation.
“Our consumption and creation and utilization of video is going to grow faster than the Verizon’s or the Comcast’s and the rest can support,” he told a sold-out audience of more than 300 during the MIT Enterprise Forum’s event “IPTV, The Scrum for the Last 6 Feet.”
The evening started with a fireside chat between Prism VentureWorks partner Woody Benson and Cuban, the founder of Broadcast.com and HDNet, and the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. After the chat the evening moved on to a panel discussion with panelists Cuban; Avner Ronen, CEO and founder of Boxee; Paul Sagan, CEO of Akamai Technologies Inc., and Will Richmond of VideoNuze.
Cuban took a fairly contrary position to the other panelists when it came to behavioral changes happening because of the rapid growth in the amount of video content, mainly because parsing the huge amount of available content is beyond any current cable or IPTV interface, at least in any easy way. And easy is what TV watching is all about, Cuban said.
“Aaron Spelling said it the best: ‘Television is the best alternative for boredom.’ It’s a mindless exercise most of the time, yet so many people want us to work at it,” he said.
The vast number of entertainment choices will drive a change in the way it gets delivered, Sagan said, specifically forcing the cable companies to move closer to an a la carte method of pricing, modeled after the change that iTunes brought to the music industry. Cuban disagreed, citing a value proposition that won’t fly with the cable companies.
“To try to sell the show a la carte - the economics don’t work. Everything gets packaged in one way or another,” Cuban said. He also said that not packaging content, particularly as the amount explodes, causes a problem for people who don’t want to have to think about what to watch in a sea of choices.
“Having all this unlimited choice sounds great when you are a kid because you have unlimited time. The more valuable your time, the less you are going to take advantage of choice,” Cuban said.
Boxee’s Ronen countered by saying that searching through almost unlimited choice in over-the-top video delivery systems, like his own company’s first offering, is a short-term engineering problem, not a barrier to change. He also said that already the younger generation just coming out of college is looking at alternative ways to get their entertainment beyond the traditional cable subscription, a trend called cord cutting.
“I think cord-cutting is not interesting. Cord-never-getting is interesting,” Ronen said.
Perhaps the only really prescient statement of the night came from Sagan, who a content delivery network that moves something like 30 percent of all Internet traffic, according to Benson. When Benson asked a question about who will win and loses in the coming video revolution, Sagan said, without hesitation, “I win.”
A full video of the fireside chat and the panel discussion can be found here
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