On the opening night of SXSW Interactive, HDNet founder Mark Cuban and Boxee founder Avner Ronan traded verbal barbs and a few well-reasoned arguments trying to answer the simple question: will Internet TV take over? Ronan sees Internet video services replacing the cable TV model and allowing users to purchase programming a la carte. Ever the businessman, Cuban just wants to see the money, or as he put it at one point, the “shekels.”
At times the debate seemed rehearsed, but that is because it started more than a year ago in a combative exchange of blog posts. (One of Cuban’s was titled “Why Do Internet People Think Content People Are Stupid?“) With the rhetorical groundwork laid, the two executives held nothing back in their face-to-face meeting.
“If you think that the Internet going to replace cable you’re crazy,” Cuban said, noting that no one in the Internet video space is making money, including Boxee, and that the current model of delivering content for free is going nowhere.
“But people are willing to pay for Internet video right now,” Ronan responded. “They are paying for Netflix, they are paying for MLB, they are paying for a lot of things,” he said. “It isn’t about free or not free. It is about whether the Internet can deliver video and it can.”
How much video and how reliably it can be delivered is a different question. And that is where Cuban made his strongest points. Having a few million users download programming a few times a week is one thing, but what about when it is tens of millions? The Internet simply wasn’t built to support that kind of delivery.
“When do you think that ESPN will say Monday Night Football could have 20 million subscribers, so let’s stream it over the Internet?” asked Cuban.
“A couple of years…,” began Ronan.
“Ha! Like two years or 200 years!?” snapped Cuban.
The hour-long debate, briefly interrupted by a fire alarm that cleared the Austin Convention Center, also touched on net neutrality, the limits of Wi-Fi home networks, and development platforms for set-top boxes.
Despite the testy exchanges and the ideological divide, there was actually a lot of agreement on practical matters. Ronan acknowledged that pay models needed to evolve and that providers like HDNet should be paid for their content. Cuban offered to put video on any network, including Internet-based platforms, as long as the numbers made sense.
For better or worse, as Cuban put it, “The future of television is television.”
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