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That is changing, but slowly. The economic slump has left consumers reluctant to invest $2,000 or more in new TV gear. Broadcasters, especially network affiliates, and cable systems have resisted HDTV, citing the costs of new equipment and lack of programming. At last month's meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas, the anti-HDTV forces worried aloud about piracy of satellite-transmitted high-def movies and even questioned whether the technology would ever work. Cuban, whose technology works just fine, retorts that movie studios are running around like Chicken Little and should be more worried about capturing a market that Cahners In-Stat expects to hit 7 million to 8 million homes by 2004. The tiny audience he has today doesn't faze Cuban. "It's like saying how many people used the Internet in 1995; it's irrelevant," he argues. "So while these guys in Hollywood keep coming up with reasons not to compete, I just walk in and establish myself and get bigger and bigger."
In hopes that HDNet will soon broadcast round the clock, Cuban is on a buying spree for content. Last month he signed a deal to broadcast 80 Major League Baseball games this season. He has laid expensive high-def cable in 40 stadiums. He helped NBC defray the costs of broadcasting the 2002 Winter Olympics in high-def so he could carry them on his network. He is shopping in Hollywood for 35-mm movies to be converted to high def. A kids' show is in the works. He even sent veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett to Afghanistan to report a seven-part series, providing the most disturbingly real pictures yet from the war zone--in jarring contrast to the main networks' blurry satellite-phone feeds. Cuban says he would have "no problem" spending $100 million of his $1.9 billion net worth to make HDNet a success. "It's not a question of if HDTV will make it, but when," he says. "It's a question of, Can I get to the economics before I run out of money? The answer is yes."
Cuban has usually managed to get to the economics ever since his boyhood in Mount Lebanon, Pa., a Pittsburgh suburb, where his father was a car upholsterer. An avid basketball player, Cuban wanted a fancy pair of Puma sneakers, but his dad wouldn't pay. So Cuban, then 12, sold garbage bags door to door to raise the cash. He was a box boy at the local grocer and worked the meat slicer at a deli and at the canteen at a summer camp. To pay his way through Indiana University, he gave disco-dancing lessons, rented the Bloomington National Guard Armory for dances and bought and ran a bar. He earned his junior-year expenses with a chain letter.
In the '80s, when computer users were still carrying floppy discs from machine to machine, Cuban bet on computer networking and founded a company called MicroSolutions in Dallas. At 31, he sold out to CompuServe for his first million bucks in 1990. In the late '90s, he started streaming radio broadcasts of Indiana basketball games live on the Internet--at first for just five friends. People laughed about the kid who turned $3,000 computers into $5 radios, but he and an Indiana buddy, Todd Wagner, turned Broadcast.com into a multimedia company and made 300 of their 330 employees millionaires.