Is Mark Cuban the high-def Ted Turner?

- New York magazine's John Heilemann profiles Mark Cuban, with special attention given to his recent hire of Dan Rather. Heilemann writes:

At a moment of wrenching change in the news business and the media game generally, Cuban stands as a singularly interesting figure: hip to technology but no quaffer of the Kool-Aid (“The Internet is boring,” he recently declared, followed by “Broadband video is overrated, too”), instinctively contrarian, possessed of a gambler’s taste for risk and an outsider’s disdain for the Old Guard’s shibboleths. In all of this, the parallels with [Ted] Turner are inescapable—and go a long way toward explaining why Cuban would take a flier on Rather and why Rather found his entreaties irresistible.



“One of the most attractive things about Mark,” Rather observed in a grateful tone, “is that, as much as anyone I know, he doesn’t give a damn about what anybody thinks.”

- Which gives me one last opportunity to plug this event on Thursday in Palo Alto, CA on the future of movies. Cuban's business partner, Todd Wagner, will be on the panel.

- Finally, via HD for Indies, MarketWatch is reporting that Amazon.com will unveil a digital video service within a month, perhaps called Amazon DV.