Before he bought the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban founded Broadcast.com, a pioneer in distributing audio and video over the internet. Now he’s getting involved in HDTV.

In a recent blog posting, he wrote:

Right now in the entertainment world, the conventional wisdom is that both sides on the HD DVD vs Blue Ray DVD will battle it out and a standard for HD on DVD will emerge.  No one is trying to rush to a compromise because the big media companies want to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out the current DVD business cycle.

Good. The longer it takes, the less chance any format of DVD has of having a place in the future of home entertainment.  Don’t look now, but the price and size of hard drives have fallen like a rock, while capacities have soared, with no slowdown in site.  

His ultimate conclusion is that hard drives (or flash media or some other rewritable storage) is the future for distribution and that DVDs are essentially headed for extinction. (Along the way he makes an interesting observation that HDTV signals have been “given away” over the broadcast spectrum for years, and yet have not let to widespread bootlegging, discrediting Hollywood’s “piracy is going to kill us” fears.)

He also articulates a variation on an idea I’ve had for a while now:

The real solution for VOD is TIVO/PVR from the main office.  PVR customers are becoming trained that when you fill up the hard drive, you have to delete something to get something. Put some PVR software on the front end, and allow users to pick from a menu of content that they can add. Then overnight, they are multicast the content , whether its via cable or satellite, it’s saved to the hard drive. If they watch it, they get billed for it and everyone is happy, and distributors maximize their revenue per bit.

One thing he doesn’t mention: once you shift to a model like this, where TV viewing is driven from a PVR and not live from the airwaves, is that you get, for free, a substantial increase in available bandwidth. First, obviously, you can make profitable use of overnight programming time when very few people are watching — but also, you immediately win back the bandwidth wasted on rebroadcasting programs close together. For example, TBS seems to broadcast the same movie two or three nights of every weekend. If people have a PVR on their side, there’s no need for the repeats - the PVR would get it the first time. Of course, this isn’t truly “on-demand”, but it wouldn’t take much before you could achieve the approximate turnaround that Netflix gets through the mail.

And of course, if you were using a packetized delivery model (like TCP/IP) instead of a circuit model like broadcast and cable television, then you wouldn’t even necessarily have to settle for overnight and multicast. You could charge people a flexible rate based on the urgency of their request; the real budget-conscious could download a few packets at a time during off-peak hours, deferring peak bandwidth to those willing to pay for it.

As an aside, while googling for some forecasts of PVR penetration in consumer households, I found this interesting snip relevant to this posting:

In a way, a TiVo surfing hundreds of channels and just showing me the most recent dozen shows I want is a lot like an RSS reader and weblogs like this one. I bet dollars to doughnuts that folks with RSS readers read more sites, more words, and more information than those that just surf the web aimlessly with a browser. Someone should phone up the Nielsen folks and show them RSS readers.

Regarding the original question, I saw a forecast (PDF) predicting PVRs in about one-third of American homes by the end of the decade, which seems a bit slow after I got myself all excited above. His basic premise is that people won’t buy them a lot, but cable companies will install them in next-generation set-top boxes, and it will take about that long for cable companies to amortize their investments in the current generation of set-top boxes.