Mark Cuban's take on 1080p, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Every field has its experts and when it comes to HDTV few people know more that Marc Cuban. The owner of the Dallas Mavericks together with Phillip Garvin launched on September 2001 a HD television channel, HDNet, well before the current explosion of HD channels.

Later they launched HDNet Movies, a channel that created quite a controversy with some theatres because of the decision to show on TV the movie the same day that it debuts in the theatres.

Despite this Cuban’s network expands its diffusion and success confirming the owner prediction that high definition will revolutionize the TV field.

For this reason it’s always interesting to know what Cuban thinks about the direction where the HDTV is going and his view on the high definition standards. TVPredictions.com gives us the chance to catch up with the HDNet owner in a two part interview.

The whole article can be divided between questions about his network and general questions about the HD. While we all hope that more cable companies will carry in the future the network and raise the bar to only pure HD content the most interesting answers are those about Cuban’s vision of the future.

Apart from predicting a price and marketing war next Christmas thanks to the (relatively) approaching switchover in 2009 he also comments a Microsoft exec statement about the 1080p standard. Andre Vrignaud (director of technical strategy for Xbox Live) said that as long as the TV is de-interlacing the 1080i correctly the 1080p standard is overrated.

Cuban agrees with the XBox executive but points out that with the 1080p the satellite and cable companies cannot rely on the user device to do some work to improve the image (i.e. for the best quality they have to use the 1080p).

In the end this standard will provide the greatest quality and will help the customers to identify who really takes into consideration the image quality.

Lastly Cuban in this interview also offers his opinion on the HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats war. He would simply…buy a low cost PC and connect it to the HDTV. If he just has to choose he would pick a HD-DVD player and wait for devices that can read both formats.

For more insight on HDNet or to read Cuban’s opinion about HD read the interview at TVPredictions.com.