Mark Cuban: Interactive TV's New Paul Revere - Simon Applebaum - MediaBizBloggers

When approaching Mark Cubanup close and personal, the first thing you get is that he's larger than life, both in appearance and speaking.

Cuban leads a few large lives these days, as owner of the Dallas Maverickspro basketball team, and as chairman/co-founder of HD Net, television's first high-definition programming channel from its 2001 beginning. Somehow the Mavericks under Cuban find their way to the National Basketball Associationplayoffs every spring. And somehow, in a tough multi-channel carriage marketplace, most TV households can find HD Net in the midst of their cable or DBS system's lineup.

Now Cuban is out to make a trifecta with the sports and TV landscape, after selling out Broadcast.com, the Web site he rose to dot.fill in the black prominence with, to Yahoo. Interactive television represents his next big frontier to conquer, and since last fall, he's been at it with the same decibel level of passion he brings to the Mavericks and HD Net. We're talking high decibels here.

Cuban launched his ITV advocacy last September at Advertising Week NYC, as part of an all-star forum of media heavyweights. There, he not only declared interactive TV would be something big, it would be "bigger on TV than interactivity online."

At another New York gathering, the AlwaysOn Mediaconference two weeks ago at Time Warner Center, Cuban disclosed that he's not only being Paul Revere for the ITV movement, he's fully engaged in developing applications for it. "I'm spending more time with platforms for Cablevision Systemsand FiOS TVand Comcast than I am for others," he announced to the crowd on hand for his keynote presentation. "We're all over interactive TV, and we're a year or two away from an inflection point. There are opportunities here and people have to recognize them."

His thinking in a nutshell: technologies such as tru2way and EBIF have unlocked the doors for all sorts of interactive applications to be disseminated among cable and satellite consumers now. But the big opportunity for ITV, where any application from any player big or small can be distributed to millions of households in one shot, is in sight, thanks to FiOS TV's initiative to modify its set-top box operating software to an open source edition.

That's the inflection point Cuban eyes. He's betting that those 100,000-plus iPhone and 20,000-plus Android applications will see the light as well, driving more appeal to ITV when, or if, they move into this arena.

All the better for him, because through HD Net, Cuban is out to cause a Dallas Mavericks e-commerce ITV service, where consumers anywhere in the nation could buy Mavericks tickets with a remote click, or any other merchandise he wants available through this system.

FiOS officials claim their open source deployment will happen in a matter of weeks. What remains to be seen is when everyone else will follow suit. After making his presentation, Cuban told me he sees one or two other multi-channel providers getting in quick, without naming names (AT&T's U-verse comes to mind because of its parent company's relationship to Apple's iPhone), and the entire multi-channel universe becoming an open source ITV universe within 36-48 months. Some operators have much more set-top software development to push than others, and how fast they can get the job done will determine if the job gets done in closer to 36 months than 48.

So now it's official: Cuban is coming, Cuban is coming to play big in the ITV space. As noted at the top, the man is larger than life, and if he can pull off this move, interactive TV as we're getting to know it will be a far more expanded and impactful direction than you think.

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More observations from the passing parade:

***About a decade ago I was the first television trade press reporter to do an extensive interview with Cisco SystemsCEO John Chambers. The interview was by e-mail for Cablevision magazine, weeks before his keynote interview at the late, very lamented Western Cable Show in Anaheim, California. At last week's Association of National Advertisers TV conference in New York, I became the first journalist covering TV to interview a virtual executive--a real-life person using virtual technology to appear on a large screen from another location--courtesy of Cisco. Still can't believe I did that. Welcome to a new age, people.

***Big congratulations to the talent behind Social Media Week, a series of events exploring the impact Facebook, Twitter, MySpaceand other SM ventures have, or will have, on every aspect of society. Thousands of people attended events in New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Toronto and San Paulo, Brazil. Here in New York, attendees are just beginning to ponder about how far Facebook, Twitter, etc. will go in TV, thanks to their availability on FiOS TV and Samsung or Vizio TV sets. Count on more dialogue about that in 2011, as more cities participate in Social Media Week.

***There's still a crisis in Haiti, and still ways to make a difference, through the Web site and phone lines of the recent Hope For Haiti Now and SOS telethon specials, and the video-on-demand presentation of the "We Are The World" video remake, among others. Use them and make the difference. The people of Haiti will thank you over and over again.

Until the next time, stay well and stay tuned.

Simon Applebaum is producer/host of Tomorrow Will Be Televised, the Internet-distributed radio program covering the TV scene. The program runs live Mondays and most Fridays at 3 p.m. Eastern time/noon, Pacific time on BlogTalk Radio (www.blogtalkradio.com). Episode replays are available 24/7 at www.blogtalkradio.com/simonapple04, and on podcast, downloadable to any major mobile device from Web sites arranged by www.sonibyte.com. Have a question or comment? Reach out to simonapple04@yahoo.com.

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