Word: def
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...gear. Broadcasters, especially network affiliates, and cable systems have resisted HDTV, citing the costs of new equipment and lack of programming. At last month's meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas, the anti-HDTV forces worried aloud about piracy of satellite-transmitted high-def movies and even questioned whether the technology would ever work. Cuban, whose technology works just fine, retorts that movie studios are running around like Chicken Little and should be more worried about capturing a market that Cahners In-Stat expects to hit 7 million to 8 million homes by 2004. The tiny...
...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 a day via DirecTV satellite, HDNet offers mostly sports, including the recent NCAA Final Four, Major League Baseball and National Hockey League games as well as concerts, beauty pageants and, yes, travelogues hosted by babes in bikinis...
...hopes that HDNet will soon broadcast round the clock, Cuban is on a buying spree for content. Last month he signed a deal to broadcast 80 Major League Baseball games this season. He has laid expensive high-def cable in 40 stadiums. He helped NBC defray the costs of broadcasting the 2002 Winter Olympics in high-def so he could carry them on his network. He is shopping in Hollywood for 35-mm movies to be converted to high def. A kids' show is in the works. He even sent veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett to Afghanistan to report...
...specialist, Phil Garvin, who helped him solve the technical and financial obstacles to HDTV broadcasting. "With regular TV, you pull a truck up to a stadium, hook up to existing cables from every camera to the truck outside and transmit," he says. "But there were no cables for high def, and the setup was expensive." Sony had to create a new cable system for the five HD cameras needed for each game. By piggybacking on FoxSports' regular NHL broadcasts and using its graphics and audio, Garvin and Cuban got the network running in 15 months...
...exchange for their help, Fox and DirecTV got options worth as much as 20% of Cuban's new network. For Thompson at Fox, HDNet is a handy "laboratory" to see how high def works, technically and economically. "If you've seen high def, you know it's gorgeous," says Thompson. "But I was skeptical of the financial model. They need to go well beyond 100,000 homes." Cuban says his customer base through DirecTV is growing 10% to 15% a month, and he's working the retail angle hard--getting 1,000 outlets such as those of Circuit City...