Dare Obasanjo slags Mark Cuban's vision of the web, and notes that he's not the first guy to make a bad bet on the way things will play out:

Unfortunately, Mark Cuban's vision of distributing high definition video over the Internet has two problems. The first is the fact that it is that distributing high quality video of the Web is too expensive and the bandwidth of the average Web user is insufficient to make the user experience pleasant. The second is that people on the Web have already spoken and content trumps media quality any day of the week. Remember when pundits used to claim that consumers wouldn't choose lossy, compressed audio on the Web over lossless music formats? I guess no one brings that up anymore given the success of the MP3 format and the iPod. Mark Cuban is repeating the same mistake with his HDNet misadventure.  User generated, poor quality video on sites like YouTube and larger library of content on sites like Netflix: Instant Viewing is going to trump the limited line up on services like HDNet regardless of how much higher definition the video quality gets.

Dare is right in his summation, where he compares Cuban to a newspaper owner - he's raging at the future while he holds an increasingly irrelevant piece of the past. The broadcast model assumes a limited number of channels, which in turn makes it hard for anyone other than professionals to get on the air. The net simply isn't like that.

It's hard to get regular op/ed space in a newspaper - there are a limited number of slots, and the well known writers get first dibs on them. It's childs play to toss up blog though, and your words can become as prominent as those of any pundit. The same thing is happening with audio and video. This hardly means that professional quality content will wither away; it does mean that it suddenly has a lot more competition.

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