So says Mark Cuban. Now, I’m typically a big Cuban fan. But I’m looking at an AdAge report on his remarks from yesterday’s Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit, and I’m a little puzzled.

Speaking at the Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit in Washington yesterday, Mr. Cuban declared “the Internet is dead” in an otherwise subdued panel that included executives such as ESPN President George Bodenheimer and Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt.The real growth medium is the “intranet,” otherwise defined as the on-demand and digital video-recording platforms provided by cable companies. “There’s less restriction on the intranet, it’s like your own corporate network for all the cable networks and even wireless,” he elaborated in an interview after the panel. “It’s all locally driven anyways. It has a true neighborhood feel. If I’m in Dallas and I’m on Time Warner Cable, I want localized content.” 

Mr. Cuban views the TV as the real computer, citing the decline in sales of desktop computers as a direct result of where media consumption is moving. “All that [content] is moving to the TV. What’s the difference between a PC and a TV? Nothing.” Social networking and user-generated content are all the rage for Web 2.0, but there’s “nothing on the horizon” from a content perspective, he said (apparently glossing over the looming launches of NBC and News Corp.’s NewCo web-video venture and Joost). Broadband video, according to Mr. Cuban, has “stopped growing.”

There’s a lot to try and parse here, and I wonder if his views would be clearer if I’d heard the entirety of his remarks.

In any case, his concept of “intranet” seems to refer to a proprietary content dump where there’s not much community or interaction. Continue reading →