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Coming Next: Personal HDTV Drives?
HDNet's Mark Cuban says high-def owners will own high-capacity storage devices in five years. He also says LCD will beat Plasma in the flat-screen war.
By Phillip Swann

Washington, D.C. (September 5, 2006) -- Mark Cuban says High-Definition TV owners will soon store their HD program libraries on high-capacity $100 hard drives.

The HDNet president and co-founder made that prediction in an interview with CNET's News.com.

"I personally think that the optimal (HD) connection will be personally managed hard drives. In five years, a terabyte or more of storage on a hard drive will be less than $100. We should be able to fill that up with music and whatever content we want in HD format, connect it to the TV and, using our remote, choose whichever movies we want," Cuban said.

Cuban added that "smart" companies will also offer hard drives that come pre-installed with high-def programs.

"If it were up to me, DIRECTV and (EchoStar's) Dish Network would merge," Cuban said. "They would buy Netflix and Hollywood Video, and then offer us 10-teraybyte hard drives full of all the content we could dream of that we can get for free or buy at a premium."

In other remarks, Cuban told News.com that:

* Video on Demand will struggle to compete with high-def services because it requires too much bandwidth to transmit a HD show on demand.

* LCD will defeat Plasma in the flat-screen TV war. "(LCD is) making the furthest strides per generation, and the capacity is growing so quickly, the prices will drop, and the sizes will grow more quickly than plasma."

Disclosure note: HDNet is an advertiser at TVPredictions.com.

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Phillip Swann is president and publisher of TVPredictions.com. He has been quoted in dozens of publications and broadcast outlets, including CNN, Fox News, Inside Edition, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times, The Associated Press and The Hollywood Reporter. He can be reached at swann@tvpredictions.com or at 703-505-3064.

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