Mike at Techdirt (that's the popular tech news blog which actually deserves its popularity) mentions that Sony is now rewriting history, trying to take credit for the success and popularity of the DVD format.
I almost admire the chutzpah -- when people ask what I do for a living, I sometimes say that I look for a parade of bloggers, and then try to get in front of the parade and pretend I was leading it. I keed! I keed!
Meanwhile, Clay Shirky was teliing the truth, too. His point may have been too subtle, buried as it was in plain English at the top of his post:
Mark Cuban doesn’t understand television. He holds a belief, common to connoisseurs the world over, that quality trumps everything else. The current object of his faith in Qualität Über Alles is HDTV.
Hmm, quality (in terms of resolution) isn't always that important. See also "I like the crappy videos" and, somewhat more broadly, Jay's long-running skepticism about freestyling being "superior" to written rhymes.
re; the quality question. You don't have to go any further than the iPod to see how Quality comes second. I love my MP3 player but you just have to plug it into a real amplifier and speakers to hear how bad it really is. And those stylish earbuds are the worst. Does anyone care - not on your life.
Er, how about YouTube? Quality is job #8,601 there, and it doesn't matter a whit.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000755.html
And I'd argue that's exactly as it should be.