Mark Cuban has sold a company for a billion dollars,
won championships with the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and shown
his business acumen on ABC’s Shark Tank, but the cable TV
channel he launched in 2001, HDNet, hasn’t grown as he hoped in
audience, profits, programming or carriage on cable systems.
“When we started HD Net the angle was high definition and it worked
great for us at first but I made one huge mistake,” Cuban said while
taking a break in his booth at the NCTA convention on Tuesday. “I
thought HD would take longer to develop than it did. What happened was
everybody took non-HD shows, up converted them and called it HD — and
nobody cared. That kind of messed us up. We lost a lot of
differentiation.”
So in early July, Cuban is going to reinvent his network with the new
name AXS (pronounced access) in partnership with the Anschutz
Entertainment Group, TV host and entrepreneur Ryan Seacrest
and CAA. That is what was announced in January, but now the new version
of the channel is actually coming into focus and to paraphrase the line
from the musical Gypsy, Cuban believes the secret to success is “you’ve gotta have a gimmick.”
