Word: def
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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...
...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...
Meanwhile, the price of digital TVs and set-top boxes is dropping fast. A 50-in. high-def TV set that cost $8,000 two years ago is now $1,800 and could drop further by Christmas. Prices of the set-top decoders necessary for high-def reception are falling too, to $250 from $750 in 2000. (Samsung, Zenith and Sony are making TVs with built-in high-def tuners.) The Consumer Electronics Association says February shipments of such digital-TV products were up 83% over the same month last year, largely in anticipation of NBC's Olympics broadcast...