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Mark Cuban says Only a moron would buy YouTube

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It seems Mark Cuban has no love for video sharing website YouTube. According to this Reuters article, Cuban told a group of advertisers in New York that “anyone who buys YouTube is a moron.”

Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for several billion dollars back in the dot com era, feels that the potential for lawsuits against a wealthy YouTube owner is too high. He added that “the only reason it hasn’t been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue.”

Though I agree with Cuban about the legal issues surrounding YouTube, I still feel YouTube has a fighting chance.

What I don’t like about YouTube is that since they don’t own a lot of the really good content, any of the big players could simply decide to clone them and keep control of their content. It would certainly cost less than the rumored $1.5Billion YouTube thinks it’s worth. But this doesn’t seem to be the case anyway, as YouTube has been signing distribution deals left and right. Big networks that had at first been put-off by YouTube, have now embraced the easy reach and distribution it has given them. The way I see it, if you can watch a show on TV (or HDTV), you won’t be watching it on YouTube’s poor quality versions. So for big shows (24, Lost, Heroes, etc.), YouTube acts like advertising: you get hooked on YouTube but then watch it on your regular TV/Cable.

As for advertising, Cuban also had harsh words for YouTube, asking advertiser if they really wanted to spend money to reach limited viewers (while at the same time offering opportunities to advertise on his own network, HDNet).

While it’s true that any one video gets fewer viewers than a single television show, it’s also true that it costs much less. What YouTube needs is to leverage their infrastructure to create more flexible advertising schemes.

While no big-time client would like their spots airing on unknown videos, YouTube could certainly create plans for ads to show whenever a video surpases a given number of views. So if a video gets viewed, shared or downloaded more than average, more expensive ads would start showing on them. Additionally YouTube could match certain advertisers with certain shows (so that in a video of Treasure Hunters, you’d still be show ads from MasterCard or Ask.com).

So there are several content distribution and advertising opportunities still to explore on YouTube. It’s up to them to show who the “moron” ultimately is.

Digital Media Strategy, Social Networking

Revision3 finally goes live

Revision3After several days of server errors, it seems Revision3 is finally live, sporting a brand new and very cool look. Gone is the “Sign Up” page… which is interesting, but more on that later. According to their own About page,

“Revision3 is the first media company that gets it, born from the Internet, on-demand generation. Unlike aggregators, mash-ups, clients and web sites, Revision3 is an actual TV network for the web, creating, producing its own original entertainment and content.“

They also mention that their “content is designed for a new audience. This audience, like television, expects dependability and quality, but unlike television, wants a more gritty, edgy, highly-targeted and in-depth form of entertainment,” and offer to make their shows available on as many platforms and through as many distribution methods as possible.

So far, so good… even the content is entertaining (Ctrl-Alt-Chicken, Diggnation, NotMTV, thebroken, etc…). The quality of the videos is very good and they are available, as promised, in a variety of formats (quicktime, wmv, xvid, theora).

Founded in part by some of the Digg boys, Revision3 is sure to make a lot of noise in the internet television scene. The lack of a sign up page (which was available, though not working, in the previous iteration) really caught my attention. While Revision3 is certainly no YouTube (content is generated by Revision3, not uploaded by users), I was expecting a certain level of personalization, viral marketing and social networking – particularly because of Revision3’s ties to Digg. I’d certainly like to be able to bookmark my favorite shows, share my playlists, see what everyone else thinks about any particular show, see a show’s ratings, and share my favorite shows with my friends. But, hard as I looked, I could not even find any mention of signing up as a regular user. I’d love to know the reasons behind this.

For more on a user-centric, internet TV experience, read Google Media: How Google will change the way you experience music, television and media in general. On that article, I explained what I envisioned Google doing on the internet television front, complete with an interface mock-up of what the user experience could be like. The same concept could apply to Revision3 as well.

Tech wise, Revision3 seems to be running on CherryPy (“a pythonic, object-oriented HTTP framework”) and their Flash video containers are done by BitGravity.