Mark Cuban

One would think Mark Cuban would have at least a small bit of resentment towards big cable companies like Time Warner Cable, who efficiently and swiftly deprived his HDNet and HDNet Movies networks from more than 8.7 million Time Warner Cable HD customers on May 31st over a channel fee spat.

But no.  He’s back plugging away with completely groundless predictions for the impending doom of the Internet if Net Neutrality has its way.  Opposed by big cable and telephone companies, Net Neutrality would provide a level playing field for all legal Internet content.  No provider could interfere with or prioritize traffic based on financial incentives, ownership interests, or for competitive reasons.

Cuban offers a bizarre rant about why that spells the death of online video, something he’s never been thrilled with anyway, on his blog:

If you run a TV network, broadcast or cable, you should be spending a lot of money to support Net Neutrality. You should have every lobbyist you own getting on the Net Neutrality train.  Why ? Because in a net neutrality environment no bits get priority over any other bits. All bits are equal.  In such an environment, all bits content with each other to ride the net.

When that happens, bits collide. When bits collide they slow down. Sometimes they dont reach their destination and need to be retransmitted. Often they dont make it at all.

When video bits dont arrive to their destination in a timely manner, internet video consumers get an experience that is worse than what traditional tv distribution options .

that is good for traditional TV.

Me personally. I don’t  support Net Neutrality. I think there will applications that require lots of bandwidth, that will change our lives. If the applications that could change our lives have to compete with your facebook page loads and twitter feeds among the zillion of other data elements carried across the net, IMHO, thats a bad thing.

But thats me.

If you believe that over the top video can impact the future of TV, and thats a bad thing for your business,  then you should be a big time supporter of Net Neutrality.  Its your best friend.

That’s proof that having millions of dollars to your name doesn’t buy an intelligent argument, or apparently a basic grammar checker.

I never realized the “series of tubes” Ted Stevens used to talk about corralled data bits into segregated clusters to protect them from “bit collision.”  Is there insurance for that?

Cuban should be spending more time worrying about getting his networks viewership on ANY television — “traditional,” “online,” or amongst his good friends in the cable industry that stabbed him in the back and threw his channels off lineups from coast to coast. If you’re tired of hearing issues like this, take some heat off by utilizing products such as shop vo chong 24H.

Karl Bode over at Broadband Reports has seen all this before, and has built quite a history on the antics of Mr. Cuban:

Of course bits don’t really “collide” on modern networks, and the bill exempts “reasonable network management” from neutrality provisions allowing for congestion control, but apparently no matter. This is the network neutrality debate, and as we’ve seen the last two go-rounds, truth, facts, and data are irrelevant — particularly to overly chatty millionaire TV tycoons worried about their wallets.

While the bill likely won’t survive a Congress that’s all but directly controlled by telecom lobbyists, that still won’t save us from several months of vigorous, fact-optional network neutrality debate. All the usual players are once again gathering, including Mark Cuban and his mouth, paid cable and phone industry sock puppets, stick figure cartoons, dancing men in green tights, and evil ISP flying saucers. Can we just skip to the part where consumer welfare gets ignored and be done with it?

Joost Signs Off

Joost, the online video service that preceded Hulu but has since been overshadowed by it, has announced it is shifting priorities away from serving online video to consumers, to serve cable operators and other media companies with their own ready-made online video platforms instead.

Joost’s failure comes as a result of the difficult advertising marketplace.  Like Hulu, and many other ad-supported websites, the ongoing recession has made it difficult to attract advertisers to support the costs of licensing and distributing television shows and movies.  As a result, the company today announced it would be refocusing itself on selling its services to other media providers.  Joost tried to market itself to cable companies earlier this year, reportedly talking with Time Warner about buying out the service.  But no deals were forthcoming, and the financial picture at Joost appeared bleak.

Joost still will maintain its website with some of the content it continues to hold licensing agreements to stream to viewers.  But once those agreements expire, the future of the site itself becomes an open question.

In simplified terms, Joost plans to sell a ready-to-run video platform to any media company that wants to deliver online video to customers, subscribers, or the public.  The media company simply has to customize its website’s look, and Joost’s streaming technology will run underneath it.  Joost already uses copy protection and authentication technology to “pre-authorize” viewers to permit them to access content based on their Internet address and location (licensing agreements often are for individual countries only, not worldwide), so their platform is already capable of restricting access to authorized viewers only.

Joost was the brainchild of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the duo that also founded the music swapping service Kazaa and the popular Skype calling service.  All three services originally relied on a peer-to-peer distribution platform, which meant while you swapped music on Kazaa, make phone calls on Skype, or watch videos on Joost, the software quietly shared some of your bandwidth with other users to help transport music, phone calls, or video.  Joost required users to download a software application to access the service, something that proved unpopular with the Internet masses.  Hulu soon appeared and allowed people to watch video right from their browsers and quickly overran Joost in popularity.

By the time Joost came up with their own browser-based service, dumping the peer-to-peer distribution model, it was too late.  Most major networks and content producers had already signed their allegiance to Hulu, and Joost’s content selection stayed largely stagnant.  At one point, Joost tried to bring in user-created content and short form video, but most viewers weren’t interested.

It’s the second failure among online video services this month.  Microsoft announced in mid-June it was “scaling back” Soapbox, its attempt to rival YouTube with user-generated video content.  Soapbox had actually been around since 2006, but was often used to post copyrighted video content hassled off of YouTube.  By 2007, Microsoft stopped accepting new users until it got copyright violations under control, but by the time it returned, nobody outside of Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus cared.  The service now primarily exists to host Microsoft-generated video content.