Mark Cuban says "The Internet is dead and boring" What he really meant was...

Mark Cuban says "The Internet is dead and boring". It is an attention grabbing headline but what he really means is that Internet bandwidth is not growing fast enough to support new innovative applications. The same could be said for cell phone bandwidth and services, Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing, etc. Mark's point is that the Internet's full potential will not be realized until network bandwidth grows on a path like processor speed did according to Moore's Law. MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are cool applications but they didn't push the envelope on technology or innovation, or stretch the limits of network bandwidth or processor speed. This is what Mark means by "boring".

Mark and his partner Todd Wagner founded Broadcast.com back in the 90's, and in 1999 sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 Billion. The idea was to redistribute radio and TV programming over the Internet. The concept was great, and it actually worked. But, the belief at the time was that bandwidth would continue to double every year or so enabling all sorts of innovation. It didn't.

Here is what Mark has to say about Internet bandwidth; "Few people's actual throughput to their homes have increased more than 5mbs in the past 5 years, and few people's throughput (if you don't understand the difference between throughput and the marketed downstream speeds your read from your ISP, you should) to their homes will increase more than 10mbs in the next 5 years. That's not enough to define a platform that allows really smart people to come up with groundbreaking ideas."

Mark Cuban is right, and we see the same problem in the cell phone space. The carriers are dragging their feet, trying to control all the applications, and building "walled gardens" around their users. Just look at all the growth and innovation happening on the cell phone platform in Europe and Asia.

Video conferencing has been around for decades, but it really hasn't taken off in a big way due to bandwidth limitations. Voice over IP (VoIP) is the same story, although we are seeing more of it now that the carriers are involved. Video on Demand works well on cable TV but could open up huge markets on the Internet if there was more bandwidth available.

Cuban's latest venture is HDnet, a high definition TV network sold through cable TV carriers. Mark said in a recent interview; "We have a vertically integrated entertainment company. We make movies; we show them in Landmark theaters; we show them on HDNet; we release them through our own DVD company, Magnolia Home Entertainment, and distribute them through Magnolia Pictures."

Mark Cuban - the next Ted Turner? - Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team, is working on a new football venture, and is thinking about buying the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Sports teams create great entertainment content for his vertically integrated entertainment company. Ted Turner did the same thing in building TBS, CNN, TNT, while owning the Atlanta Braves baseball team and Atlanta Hawks basketball team.

Ted Turner bought Hanna/Barbera the Saturday morning cartoon producer for $550M. Ted said other potential buyers saw it only as a library of low budget cartoons that could only be used as re-runs in syndication. But Ted saw Hanna/Barbera as the base content for a new network he would build. He would call it The Cartoon Network and it would go on to make billions for Turner.

Entrepreneurs see things that others don't. At first experts will say it is the dumbest idea they ever heard. But the entrepreneur pushes ahead and makes it happen anyway. Then the experts say, that was simple and obvious...the entrepreneur was just lucky...in the right place at the right time. Entrepreneurs know what I am talking about. It happens all the time.

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Comments

[Mukund Mohan]

Don
How do you explain the fact that S Korea has tons of bandwidth apparently and WiFi everywhere and the only innovative thing I see from there is multi player games. The assumption that more bandwidth allows for more innovation is not an obvious conclusion.

[Stefan Constantinescu]

Mukund Mohan: Are you attempting to say that the rich telecommunications infrastructure in South Korea has led to 0 innovation?

Excuse me?

[Mukund Mohan]

Stefan
I think you meant to say no innovation. Yes that's what I said. Everything I see from S Korea is a knockoff and localized version of a US web 2.0 company. Let me know which ones I am missing.

[David Dalka]

Excellent point - especially about the bandwith on cell phones - this is why so many still rely on SMS instead of taking things to the newer technologies available - but that aren't adopted fully for a variety of reasons, one of which you mention here.

That is a barrier to future progress. How do you propose resolving this?

[Bernard Moon]

There are a lot of trends and innovation from S. Korea beyond gaming. The use of mobile camera phones a few years before the rest of the world and today mobile video conferencing is commonplace probably a few years before the rest of the world. Avatars, online personas, and widespread use of human-powered search and VoIP are some of the other online innovations and trends that began 2-5 years before they hit the U.S.

For a small country, this environment of 100Mbps Internet service (vs. 5Mbps for a typical cable connection in the U.S.) and 30 Mbps wireless service has helped to lead Korea to greater innovations and discovery of human behavior by being immersed in such a high-bandwidth world. With the U.S.'s stronger entrepreneurial cultural, I expect a lot more innovation to occur when it becomes a 100 Mbps world on these shores.

[Bernard Moon]

Also here is an article I wrote on this topic back in 2005 for AlwaysOn, but I posted a copy at OhMyNews, the first successful online citizen journalist site that was started in S. Korea in 2000:

"Where technology is ubiquitous, opportunity abounds: What the United States and others can learn from Korea's ubiquitous broadband environment."
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=4&no=206233&rel_no=1

[T1 internet access]

Excellent comments about the internet.
The internet in the U.S. is dead and boring because of the slow connection speed compared to other countries.
For example, T1 internet access is 50 to 100 times faster in Japan, France and South Korea than in the U.S.