Is Mark Cuban the Savior of Online Video?

Thank goodness Mark Cuban has all the answers. The Broadcast.com-made billionaire thinks he knows how to "save Internet video."

His solution? In a nutshell, he says NBC and Fox have it all wrong. They should forget about giving users the content they want on their PCs. Instead, they should focus on bringing the content to the TV through cable or telecom providers.

"Move the video cloud to the node and encode and insert into the traditional video distribution systems.

Rather than Hulu sending its video directly across the net to your PC, and let the end user figure out how to watch and distribute from there, it should send it to a box hosted by your cable/telco and possibly even satellite provider, which then transcodes the video and places it on the existing TV distribution system and sends it across a channel branded with your name and the name of the file to your TV," Cuban writes on his blog.

It's a nice thought, but we're not sure it's such a hot idea to give the telecom/cable providers any more power than they have already. And his suggestion that people could pay a "buck or two" to subscribe to internet video seems a bit naive -- more likely, consumers would end up forking over a "buck or two" per month just in useless fees or taxes.

by Betsy Schiffman for Wired.com

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