It's bad enough that the Feds are still breathing down his neck over purported insider trading. Now Cuban must grapple with the loss of access to Time Warner's 13 million video subscribers.

"Wish I could get HDNets back on TWC, but I can't," Cuban tweeted yesterday, indicating he had failed in his efforts to get Time Warner to reverse its yanking of the network a few days earlier.

Cuban had been trying to get the flagship HDNet station out of Time Warner's marginal "HDTV Tier," which costs an extra $5 per month, and into a more widely-seen subscription package. Time Warner subscribers get a wide variety of HD channels even if they don't sign up for the "HDTV Tier."

Apparently the self-styled media maverick pushed the issue too hard, because now he's off the system entirely despite an offer to significantly reduce HDNet's fees.

The cut means CBS-newsman-turned-HDNet-star Dan Rather is off the air in New York, except for satellite customers.

Perhaps all this stress and conflict explains why Cuban was hitting the dessert table so hard at Dow Jones' "D" tech conference the other day; watch him work the free conference snacks in the background of the Beet.TV video below.

If you're wondering what Yahoo Video is, don't blame yourself. Yahoo's video site, the descendant of the foolhardy $5.7 billion acquisition of Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com in 2000, is a grab-bag of funny cat videos, sports and news clips, and third-rate Web originals.

Yahoo Video has struggled to compete with YouTube's reputation as an all-in-one destination and Hulu's clearly curated collection of primetime entertainment. Its prehistoric video technology and Dallas operations center, a legacy of the Broadcast.com deal, has meant that it costs Yahoo more to serve up a video than Google. It hasn't helped that the video group has had a revolving door of leadership. Onetime Yahoo Music chief Ian Rogers ran it briefly before leaving for a startup last year, handing it over to Yahoo Media chief Scott Moore, who promptly split for Microsoft.

Yahoo has also shuttered Jumpcut, its user-generated video site, in favor of Flickr, which now hosts what it calls "long photos" — mostly personal clips taken on digital cameras. Cuban, the founder of Broadcast.com, predicted that most videos on the Internet would be home movies. Shame he didn't tell Yahoo that before he sold it a $5.7 billion bag of goods.

Update: A tipster at Yahoo points out that Broadcast.com wasn't the only bad investment Yahoo made in video. More recently, its $200 million purchase of Maven Networks went sour:

I'm not sure if any tech news blogs have carried this info but there has been a significant shift in Yahoo! video strategy. For the past month or so, and last week in particular the entire Y! video product management team and key engineers have either moved on, resigned, or let go. For a long time the team has been pushing the management to take on a more "Hulu-like" or premium content approach but with portfolio rationalization and internal politics, the key guys pushing for this change have been moved out. Last year Yahoo! spent almost $200 M purchasing white label publishing company - Maven, that strategy is also out of the door, video is now in a sad state in Yahoo! abandoned and in maintainence mode. The sad part is that folks currently leading the video charge and the ones with poor vision, execution capability, and responsible for putting the company $200M in the hole! Yahoo! continues to amaze me. Hulu, YouTube, and others will now be leaders in video monetization.

Intellectually, that is, as opposed to financially. Most people attending South By Southwest Interactive admit that they're there for the chance to hang out in Austin with the same Internet buddies they hang out with in San Francisco and Brooklyn. Without the parties, what's the point? That's always been the case with South By Southwest. It's just that with the economy prostrate and the social-networking bubble thoroughly popped, there's not even money to skim from the froth.

There's still enough money to pay for tickets to Austin, of course. But in good times and bad, SXSW has always suffered from a lack of purpose. The music and film festival which gave birth to it has real songs and real movies to talk about. The attendees of SXSW Interactive have nothing to look at but each other, and nothing to listen to but their own kind. Surely that explains why it ends up being a group grope of self-congratulation over little at all.

Ah yes, the bubbly parties. Facebook threw a party celebrating the launch of a tool for linking Facebook friends to iPhone apps, completing the circle of two recent technological fads. And Dennis Crowley's Foursquare — which may be based on code he sold to Google, his former employer — facilitated so-called "flash parties" at bars for those who couldn't get on the official party invite lists, or didn't care to wait in line. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, launched Wefollow.com, a directory of users for Twitter, to help navigate the mess of messages broadcast on the service.

In other words, the best and brightest of Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley are working on iterations of existing software for the most frivolous of purposes. There's not even a fundamental innovation in this round of tweaks meant to help you waste time more efficiently. (Gawker Media, the publisher of Gawker and Valleywag, threw a party of its own — but at least my colleagues were open about their intentions, which seemed to involve getting a bunch of geeks liquored up.)

It all reminds me of Camp Cyprus — the group of 20 Web cognoscenti, a gaggle of Facebookers and startuppers and wantrepreneurs who flew to a rich kid's dad's vacation home on the Mediterranean last fall and created a video of them cavorting in swimsuits to celebrate their own brilliance to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." It was an incredibly tone-deaf gesture at a time when Wall Street was imploding and people were losing their jobs.

Except the economy hasn't gotten any better. And South By Southwest Interactive has more than 10,000 attendees. So doesn't that make its excesses 500 times worse?

A few people had the sense to avoid this particular trainwreck. Ev Williams, the CEO of Twitter, gave it a pass — even though the tech crowd at SXSW did so much to popularize his status-updating service. That the likes of Rose and Crowley are the stars of this year's South By speaks to how far it has fallen.

I first attended South By Southwest a decade ago, when the dotcom boom had 12 months left to run. Mark Cuban, then the head of Broadcast.com, gave a keynote speech about Internet video; he sold his Web-video startup, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo a month later for $5.7 billion. Under Yahoo's ownership, Broadcast.com went on to not be YouTube.

The difference between then and now: Thanks to the delusions of public-market investors, there was actually money to be made from what Internet insiders admitted were inanities. Now there's no money and no hope of making it. There's just the frivolity left.

Videographer Richard Blakeley quizzed bloggers on the highlights and lowlights of this year's South By Southwest.

Scenes from South By Southwest: (photos by Scott Kidder and James Del)

Tumblr founder David Karp has a new Tumblrette, Stephanie Wei! Update: Okay, we've gotten this whole who's-David-Karp-dating thing straight. Stephanie Wei was recently spotted with Karp at a birthday party for Briana Swanson. A tipster explains:

Karp is most definitely dating Stephanie Wei though, to the annoyance of many. Her friends were calling and emailing me asking if he was gay or not a couple of weeks ago, and now they complain that she's always with him.

Karp's sex life sure is confusing!
Pop17's Sarah Austin shows off her intellectual property.

Former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas puckers up to Laughing Squid's Scott Beale.

Lifehacker editor Adam Pash demonstrates how to open a beer bottle with a piece of paper.

Wine Library TV's Gary Vaynerchuk and "friend," which is caption-writer code for "we don't know who this is" very important person Becca Camp.

Facebook employees pop champagne with sparklers, just in case you missed the point that they were drinking champagne.

CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen and Tumblr's David Karp attempt to locate South By Southwest's point.

Cuban's basic defense: Yes, I sold a bunch of stock after the CEO of a company I partially owned told me confidential, nonpublic information that I knew would hurt the stock price. But I never agreed to keep the information confidential, so there! Then he says (through his lawyer) that the CEO of said company is full of shit because he can't even remember the conversation. They posted this excerpt of an interview with the CEO:

1) Q- We spoke earlier about you were telling Mr. Cuban in words or substance : “I have confidential information for you”.

A- Right.

2) Q- Do you recall anything Mr. Cuban said in response or reply to that statement by you ?

A- No, I do not.

Then they insinuate that the SEC's timing of the lawsuit is fishy. So there you have it: everyone is conspiring against Mark Cuban. We will continue to watch with an open mind.

[WSJ. And I know nothing about the law, but doesn't this defense sound strange on a logical level? You're not allowed to sell stock on inside information, but if you didn't agree not to do it, then you can? Any lawyers in the house here?]

• The SEC doesn't have a statement from anyone saying that Cuban knowingly ordered an insider trade.
• Regulators dropped an investigation of Mamma.com over allegations of securities-law violations days before starting their investigation of Cuban. Cuban's unspoken implication: Someone must have made a deal.
• Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, as seen on Dancing with the Stars, makes a better target for ambitious SEC staffers than the forgotten Mamma.com team.
• Oh, but Cuban's got a blog. Eat this, SEC!

Mark Cuban today responded to a civil complaint filed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States District for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division. In its complaint, the Commission charges that Mr. Cuban engaged in violations of the federal securities laws in connection with transactions in the securities of Mamma.com Inc.

This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the Commission’s claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division.

Mr. Cuban stated, “I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.”

[Blog Maverick; pic via Dallas Observer. And FreeMarkCuban.com is already active, even though he's still free.]

[Snip]

Just sell it anyhow! Smooth. [Full complaint here]

Mark Cuban would be just another rich guy except for his penchant for saying whatever pops into his head. He constantly criticizes the NBA, which is a no-no by owners. The flipside is he gets great PR. Although half of it is bad! Oh well. He also has a blog that is sometimes hilarious and not well thought out a bit.

At the moment, Cuban wants to buy the Chicago Cubs from Tribune Co., which needs to sell the storied baseball franchise to raise cash, which it will burn in a vain attempt to save its newspapers. The idea of Cuban—a maverick—owning the Cubs absolutely kills traditionalists, who think he would totally ruin all the great Chicago traditions, such as having ivy on the outfield walls and losing constantly.

So is it possible that there was some shady conspiracy that caused this allegation from 2004 to surface just in time to (likely) torpedo any chance Cuban has of buying the Cubs? You would have to be a crazy conspiracy freak to believe this, for which there is no evidence whatsoever, so please don't sue us.

The SEC alleges in a civil action that Mr. Cuban sold his entire 6% ownership stake on June 28, 2004, after learning that Mamma.com was raising money through a private investment in a public entity, or PIPE. The next day, on June 29, the company announced the PIPE financing and shares of the company dropped by more than 10%. By selling his stake, the SEC alleges, Mr. Cuban avoided more than $750,000 in losses.

In a PIPE transaction new shares are issued at a discount to the current trading price. An announcement of a PIPE transaction is often followed by a drop in the stock price as shareholders anticipate their stake will be diluted.

(Illustration by the Wall Street Journal)

Conference

• Connectivity still an issue. Wifi out on Monday and the major celebs showed up to kowtow to King Arrington and Jason
• There is a secret mutiny going on with startups in the pay-to-play Demo Pit. They gave out poker chips to ticket holders to vote for their favorite startups, there 3 colors one for each day to decide. A single company, through the use of hot and semi naked booth girls has managed to monopolize Day 1's chips (80). The winner of the chips would get a review and extra publicity. So to counter the startup — which does something stupid — there are now alliances going on where other startups are grouping together and sharing their chips so that one company doesn't win. So far about 20 companies are in this coup.

Dinner

• Showed up for Nicole Jordan's dinner party at Lulu's. The bill was like $3k and I had to pay like $100 when I thought the meal was free.
• Calley Nye showed up, brought by Larry Chiang, but very quickly cozied up to Barney Pell of Powerset. They were hugging and cuddling and the guy had his hand on her thigh/knee the entire time.

Party

• Held at club Temple, they intermixed the TC50 crowd with the young kids that just randomly showed up. Music was loud and obnoxious and the crowd was a weird mix of uncomfortable geeks and drunk kids.
• snuck into VIP floor with Mark Cuban and entourage, bought him a beer
• Met [former FuckedCompany blogger] Pud and spoke to him about startups and AdBrite. he's finally very happy with with the way it's working right now.
• Jason calacanis showed up and he was pretty drunk most of the time.

After party

• At the W Hotel bar/lobby with Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, Frank Gruber.
• Mark had a gaggle of blondes surrounding him. Most look 18. He kissed and rubbed quite a few them right next to me as I tried to get drinks. One was very upset that Mark wasn't giving her enough attention.
• Jason Calacanis is blizted enough to be stumbling everywhere
• Met a drunk girl that work for Geni/Yammer. She's apparently David Sak's BFF, some major assistant to the producer of Rush Hour or something. Got recruited from LA to handle "book-keeping and HR." says she's under NDA but eventually figured out that she has stock and they're working out a way to sell Yammer, a side project, by the next month.
• Calley showed towards the end of the night and approached Jason Calacanis while his wife was standing next to him but then Mark Cuban.
• As the party ended she's managed to convince him to let her hold his hand while he's hugging and kissing the other blondes.
• When we got kicked she managed to get herself into the front seat of Mark's surburban along with his entourage and left.
• Jason left in a limo at 2:30am with a very disgruntled wife and most likely not able to wake up for TC50 Day 3

In our world of social networking and high-definition television, Mark Cuban is the 1,000-pound gorilla in every room. But in the boardrooms of professional sports, he's just this punk Internet new money kid who doesn't understand how proper decorum and deals get made. And Mark Cuban is almost 50 years old! He's old enough to be Mark Zuckerberg's dad!

• Lucian A. Bebchuk, professor, Harvard Law School
• Frank J. Biondi, Jr., former president and CEO of Viacom
• John H. Chapple, president of a privately-owned equity firm
• Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, cofounded HDNet and Broadcast.com, legendarily screwed over Yahoo in its purchase of Broadcast.com
• Adam Dell, managing general partner, Impact Venture Partners; brother, Michael
• Carl C. Icahn
• Keith A. Meister, Icahn crony
• Edward H. Meyer, chairman and CEO of an investment management company
• Brian S. Posner, private investor

(Photoillustration by Jackson West; photo of Icahn by AP/Mark Lennihan)

The day on which the Thank God We're Working Summer TV Press Tour got its start was one of singular euphoria. ...

So thrilled were the critics with the whole still-employed/Beverly Hills/expense-account thing, they generously overlooked TV One following its first session, on racism in America, with one that kicked off with homophobic remarks made by a guy who appears to be one of the new co-hosts of TV One show Black Men Revealed.

And, hours later, they also graciously let it slide when Florence Henderson — born 1934 — slipped in a reference to herself as being part of the baby boom generation...

*GUNSHOT*

And this is one of the good items — a self-effacing glimpse into the abyss of modern culture, where ex-SAG president Ed Asner predictably wheezes on behalf of an actors strike, the Hallmark Channel cannibalizes the very bones of cable television and Ted Koppel fakes what little funk remains beneath his ever-thickening species of wig. Sign us up, seriously. How did we ever overlook the credentialing process?

We think we know, actually: Having proven its irrelevance after nobody — not readers, not viewers, nobody except perhaps the overextended networks and publishers who pay for it all, and certainly not us — even noticed when the WGA strike necessitated its cancellation last January, the TCA press tour is but a holdover of entitlement and uselessness, all but invisible, little but dead. Which is to say: Make it stop. Dogs, ponies, shows — drown them all, pocket the money, make better TV and hire back the swaths of critical dead who gave half a fuck before polishing network turds became the law of the land.

Or just call it even. We don't even care at this point as long as the publicity reach-around in TV, film, politics and pretty much any measurable media ecology makes so few people happy or even remotely intrigued. Just make it stop. Katherine Heigl doesn't need your defenses, Chandra Wilson. Olivia Munn and Kevin Pereira's "romantic tension"? Kill yourselves. Mark Cuban on day-and-date film releases for the trillionth time? He can afford to be wrong for 20 lifetimes, but beat writers fall for it year after year after year.

So, TCA press tour attendees? Hello? We love you as people, support you as peers and just want to see you happy. Really. And we know your editors will take it rough, but they'll get over it, and anyway, it's time: Put this dog down.

• That Sputtering Sound You Hear? Another Press Tour Revs Up [Washington Post]

YouTube has become the poster child for the old saying "we are losing money on every sale, but we will make it up in volume." YouTube is broken. The reason is Hulu. Hulu posts clips on YouTube. Those clips cost Hulu nothing, generate traffic to its Hulu site on which it sells out. Two areas that Hulu is stomping Youtube: 1. Revenue Per Video 2. Revenue Per User. Hulu has the right to sell advertising in around every video on its site. YouTube has that right for only [a] small percentage of videos because YouTube hides behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. By next year, Hulu will have more total revenues than YouTube. The more traffic Hulu generates, the more money it makes. The more traffic YouTube generates, the more money it loses. Maybe they think they will make it up with even more volume?

(Photo by eschipul)

The board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. Microsoft's bid of $33 per share is a superior to Yahoo's prospects. It is irresponsible to hide behind management's overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72 percent premium. Yahoo and Microsoft would compete with Google. Shareholders asked me to remove the current board and negotiate a merger with Microsoft. I therefore purchased approximately 59 million shares, formed a 10-person slate, sought antitrust clearance to acquire $2.5 billion worth of Yahoo. Heed your shareholders and negotiate a merger with Microsoft.

• Lucian A. Bebchuk is Professor at Harvard Law School.
• Frank J. Biondi, Jr served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Viacom, Inc.
• John H. Chapple [is] President of a privately-owned equity firm.
• Mark Cuban, owner of the [Dallas Mavericks] National Basketball Association franchise, cofounded HDNet and Broadcast.com.
• Adam Dell is the Managing General Partner of Impact Venture Partners.
• Carl C. Icahn.
• Keith A. Meister, of Icahn Enterprises G.P. Inc. and Icahn Capital LP.
• Edward H. Meyer serves as Chairman, CEO of an investment management company.
• Brian S. Posner is a private investor.
• Robert Shaye is Co-Chairman and Co-CEO of New Line Cinema.