Mark Cuban Touts Power of TV Over Digital

MIAMI: Mark Cuban, the president of AXS TV, delivered the opening keynote at NATPE, in which he argued that television has a huge advantage over the Internet, as a tool for starting social conversations.

The technology titan, who has long been a leader in the digital space, compared television and the Internet, and ultimately declared TV as the winner. “If you look at what any [streaming platform] does, they take the content source, they encode it, they put it out via digital and it goes out to an end device; how is that any different from television?” he asked the crowd in the Fontaine Ballroom.

He went on to explain that the difference is "when you put it out over the Internet, the Internet is designed for everything but video. Television is designed for video."

Cuban said that TV has a huge advantage in social media. To argue this point, he brought up the issue of “zero latency,” which is when everyone experiences something at the same time. He asked the crowd who among them had a perfect wireless connection, to which very few raised their hands. He then asked if everybody’s TV works rights when you turn it on, to which everyone responded positively. “The thing about zero latency is that with television, pretty much everyone sees the same thing at the same time. Now that we’re sitting with our devices—it used to be that one hand was down our pants and the other was on a beer, now we have two hands on a devices—we’re tweeting and posting to social media, using television as the instigator.”