Mark Cuban is no stranger to controversy. Whether it’s his jibes at David Stern and the NBA’s referees or his taunting of opposing players and “over-involvement” in the Dallas Mavericks’ team huddle. He most recently dipped his toes into the media fishbowl with suggestions that steroids should be used in the NBA (within reason) in order to speed-up the healing process and reduce injury down time — this of course raised a variety of responses.
However, I refer to none of these things here. It’s worth remembering that outside of David Stern’s empire, Cuban was originally an billionaire dot-com entrepreneur and is now the chairman and co-founder of HDNet, the first high-definition satellite television network. He has a multitude of views on the future of the internet, media and broadcasting.
One of those views is that paid content is the way of the future. As you can imagine, in this internet-is-the-way, everything-is-free society, that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. To summarise, Cuban’s idea appears to be that for traditional media to continue to exist and be profitable, they need to monetise better by making all of their content into paid content.
Now, would you be happy to pay for the TV shows that you watch on free to air, on a show-by-show basis? Would you be happy to pay for access to the newspaper websites that you have become accustomed to reading for free? I know a lot of people balk at the idea of paying for ESPN’s Insider content.
Of course, as Cuban points out, a bit factor in getting people to pay for something, is ensuring that they really need that content, in the way that investment bankers need access to the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg subscriptions etc. Not all content falls into that category though — do you NEED to have access to that gossip column? Perez Hilton? Nope… I think those types of business models will need to exist on the old advertising model.
This ties into basketball too. We already know that the NBA charges a subscription to use it’s Broadband League Pass service. And numerous teams have online streaming services now, such as the one recently released by the Portland Trail Blazers for the 09/10 season… and what do you know? The Mavericks can even be watched via Cuban’s own HDNet.
Here is video of Cuban talking about his views (in brief) at the Web 2.0 Summit:
A full half-hour version of the same discussion can be found here, if you are interested enough. And it does make for interesting listening.
If you want to follow Cuban’s dialogue via his BlogMaverick blog, check out these links:
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My Advice to Fox & MySpace on Selling Content – Yes You Can
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To Michael Wolff – I’m Rubber You’re Glue
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Sports Ratings Records and what it tells us about the internet
I have to say that I like Cubes’ ideas. He’s obviously very clued in on the industry, a bright man and thinks about these issues a lot. There is a lot for all of us to think about in terms of how we view the media in the near future.
