I disagree with Mark Cuban re HDTV and web video

I love reading Mark Cuban's blog. It's great.

But today I read his post called A Little Ditty about Web Video and HDTV

I totally disagree with his post.

HDTV, ie progressive scan monitors, are going to help web video not hurt it.

a) In the past there was a big challenge getting web content to look good on SD/480i TVs. That was actually one of the big things we did at WebTV.

Then and now web creators assume that the consumer has a progressive scan monitor in front of them. Text looks bad on SD. Videos flicker. Photos - well forget it.

HDTV changes that. I have a Mac mini hooked up to our HDTV. Watching YouTube or Veoh is a lot of fun. Does it look as amazing as Mark's HDNet. Nope but consumers love it. And with continued compression, networking and storage miracles the quality of video is going to get only better. And quickly.

b) while it's true that old PCs don't have DVI or HDMI connectors, he's underestimating the current state of affairs. All Macs have DVI output. Even this crappy $329 Dell has DVI output.

c) I think his view of 2 way cablecard hurting web video is backwards. If we get 2 way cablecards than PCs (macs whatever) will become the set top box of the future. Not only will they become capable of getting HD linear broadcast and VOD but also access to web video. Thats why 2 way cablecards aren't here yet.

As I've said earlier, the CE guys have created a mess with the advent of HDTV. It's hard to use, hard to manage and hard to set up. And our cable friends need to fix the cablecard restrictions so we can get some real innovation at the edge.

But HDTV isn't a problem. It's a key part of the solution.

 

Comments

[Brian Boyko]

Good points all.

[Jeff Geiser]

I agree - and I think you 2 way cable card comments are spot on.. if the restrictions ever get lifted it will allow for true innovation at the edge..

[Kraig Bailey]

I think you've have missed the biggest (pun
intended) issue: file sizes. HDTV is HUGE!Forget crap like Apple's
"near DVD" quality-it's unwatchable. SD from sources like DirecTV
and digital cable is so bad it's unwatchable due to compression
artifacts. OTA HD can look pretty good-but there are still
artifacts-and that's at 19 Mb/s.

When I switched to cable I A/B'd OTA
vs. their HD and found it acceptable. The SD looks horrible but I
watch that as little as possible. I've not seen any realtime internet
video that I deem of acceptable quality. I'll watch-but only if the
content is unavailable elsewhere. Once you see HDTV it's hard to
look at anything else.

My sister has had HDTV for over a year. To
me that means it's moved well beyond the "early adopter" stage. And
as she and my brother-in-law expose friends to HD they also buy sets.
Sports really shine in HD.

My DSL speed is about 1.5 Mb/s. I could get faster but would have to pay far more than I'm willing to.

A HD film uses a minimum of 20 gigabytes authored
with the latest AVC or VC-1 CODECs. So a film would take a couple of
days to download! And where do you keep it? A hard drive will fill
up pretty quickly with files that large.

So that's why I laugh my ass off every time I hear some tech "visionary" talking about HD over the internet or through VOD.It's a simple issue of bandwidth. It will be MANY years before it becomes feasible.So I'll watch my HD DVR and buy my Blu Ray movies, thanks!

[bijan]

hi kraig-

few thoughts:

first, mark makes points about PCs not being able to physically connect to HDTV's. We can agree that he's wrong.

second, in the early part of mark's post he talks about "web video" not hd video. web video is can play on PCs which in point #1 can connect to TVs. lots of people do this actually

and third, our PC will be able to play HD content. Blu-ray and HDDVD drives are going to be in PCs for sure. so your PC will play HD content locally and non-hd content over the network *initially*

Time shifting makes this even easier (do you have a tivo). A terrabyte in the home is a no brainer within a year or 2. Then HD with compression over the internet and stored is a natural. Todays TiVos and PCs ship with a 250 gig drive. it's only getting bigger, pipes are only getting fatter and compression is only getting better. H.264 is stunning.

[Kraig Bailey]

I still don't think you are grasping the size of the files involved. An HD movie compressed with H.264 (aka AVC or MPEG4) is going to run close to 30 gigs! This will not be streamed over the internet any time soon. The minimum rate this could be done at is 12 Mb/s. That's 10 times the rate I or most people have now.

Last year the final town in the USA got phone service-so that took 100 years. Cable has only 70-80% penetration and that's taken 40 years. It's going to be decades before a majority of people have access to this kind of bandwidth. And are they going to be willing to pay for it? I could get faster speeds now but at a cost higher than I am willing to pay.

A terabite drive will hold about 30 HD movies. Right now I have 1400 DVDs in my library. I'll be buying Blu Ray discs for some time to come.
Also keep in mind that every hard drive fails. So you either need to double your storage to back up or lose all the downloads you've paid for.

Apple is using H.264 for their HD trailers. They look OK but not great. They also take a LONG time to download. Apple is using H.264 for their "near DVD quality" tv and movie downloads-which look like crap IMHO.

I used to have DirecTiVo. Great UI. Horrible video quality. Now I have a Charter HD DVR. Horrible UI but the HD video is gorgeous.

I do video for a living so I am more critical than most when it comes to quality. Last spring a friend with DirecTiVo called me and asked if some of the college hoop March Madness games looked bad. And he is colorblind! So even the average Joe can spot over-compressed crap digital video. People don't seem to mind when it comes to their music files but as more and more people see what gorgeous HDTV can look like they will demand better video quality.

[Erik Schwartz]

Kind of off the point but...

The real limitation right now for the growth of streaming, on-demand HD is the HFC network (hybrid fiber-coax) architecture of most cable plants. It comes down to node size and how much bandwidth is available within the node.

Remember it's a contention based system, all the homes within the node share the same bandwidth to and from the node. While it is comparitively cheap to increase the bandwidth from the headend to the node, it is REALLY expensive to increase the bandwidth within the node. All the homes passed within the node share that commodity.

If the loop within the node is 100 Mbps it doesn't take many people trying to stream HD at 5Mbps to bring the network to a crawl. Node sizes range from about 250 homes passed to around 2000 homes passed. Average node size is about 750 homes passed.

Back on point...

The popularity of web video as people get more and more used to HD? Hard to say. Is web video even a "living room lean back" experience? I suspect not so much. I think the real challenge of the living room "lean forward" experience, is the keyboard and mouse based web ui, not connecting the computer to the monitor. If you start designing websites (video and others) to be easily navigable with a joystick based game controller, then you'll be getting there.

[craig zobel]

Bijan- you're right with your post: people DO have the ability to buy computers that hook up to their HDTVs, and are edcuating themselves to do it- because they want it bad. I'd not thought of it, but I agree- the cable companies are probably scared to give it away free with a 2 way PC-card. But the progressive scan thing is the real truth- because of that, it doesn't look TERRIBLE. Most people are cool with it as long as it doesn't look like total garbage.

Kraig- I think you are sorta off topic with your comments. Who cares if it's possible to stream HD content over the web? When was that ever the reason people were trying to hook their TV up to the computer? It's so they can watch Youtube (or iTunes podcasts or whatever) in a social situation without being crowded around a little computer. It doesn't have to be 1080p- it just has to be better than total crap.

I disagree that it's not a "lean back" experience. People wanna "watch" the internet. I'm not saying they are gonna watch 30 minute episodes of anything, but I've encountered a lot of situations over the last year where someone in a social group is trying to explain a web video or something, and ends up getting a bunch of people to crowd his/her laptop. And everybody complains cuz its inconvienent.

When it comes to those 30 minute episodes of things (or 90 minute or whatever)- people wanna collect things, and that's not gonna change for a while. You said it yourself:

"Right now I have 1400 DVDs in my library."

Okay, so people won't stream movies. They'll just buy DVDs, HD DVDS, BluRay, or whatever. They'll want to buy it to own the high quality version of that thing they liked. And they will still hook up their TVs to the computer... To watch Youtube or some yet-to-be created thing that will suck more eyes away from traditional big media.