Word: cubans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...three hours before a Dallas Mavericks home basketball game, and team owner Mark Cuban is sitting with his bare feet on the coffee table, surfing satellite-TV offerings on five huge screens in his courtside suite at the American Airlines Center. Clicking on Channel 199, he pauses to watch a bikini-clad woman conducting a tour of an Egyptian temple. The picture is startling not because of the bikini but because everything seems so real--as if the woman and the temple were somehow just outside the window. "It's like being there, isn't it?" asks Cuban, with something...
...then, he is the owner of the channel onscreen. Having made his first million dollars on computer networks in the '80s and his first billion on the Internet in the '90s, Cuban is now betting on high-definition television, which uses digital technology to produce a picture four times as sharp as that of its nearest competitor. Last September, eager to broadcast Mavericks games in the high-definition format and frustrated by the industry's slow conversion to digital, Cuban launched HDNet --the first national TV network to offer all its programming in high def. On the air 16 hours...
...agrees that it's a joy to watch. You can literally see each bead of sweat rolling off a player onscreen. The format's adoption, however, has been slowed by a broadcasting industry that has billions of dollars invested in the old ways of doing TV. Now comes Cuban, who has a proven eye for the next hot technology. He knows when to invest and--rarest of gifts--when to sell. After creating Broadcast.com to transmit radio programs over the Internet, Cuban sold out to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999. Later that year he unloaded or hedged...
Richard Doherty, who analyzes digital-technology trends for the Envisioneering Group in Seaford, N.Y., observes, "Now that Cuban is clearly in the tech and marketing lead, the broadcasters are taking notice. He's been more effective in the last seven months than companies 100 times his size have been in the last seven years." Cuban's efforts got a big boost two weeks ago, when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell pressed the TV industry to roll out HDTV more quickly...
...Cuban, 43, can afford to travel the world or just hang out with his players on the customized $46 million Boeing 757 he bought for the Mavericks. Instead, he has taken on another business challenge--a daunting one--with HDTV. Of 100 million U.S. households with TVs, only 2 million have high-definition sets, most of them used for playing movies on DVD, according to Cahners In-Stat Group research. Neither Cuban nor DirecTV will say how many of the company's 10.7 million satellite-TV subscribers have the special set-top boxes required to receive the high-definition signal...