OTHER TECH

Mark Cuban is the recipient of our first-ever Editors' Choice Visionary Award. Check out our exclusive video interview with Cuban at the awards ceremony.

When I arrived in Dallas to interview media pioneer Mark Cuban, he looked like he was sitting on top of the world. The day before, three movies he helped produce - including George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck - were nominated for 2006 Indie Spirit Awards, the Oscars of the independent-cinema set. Bubble, the first of six pictures to come out of a deal with Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic), would soon be released in theaters, on DVD, and on his HDNet Movies cable/satellite channel - all at the same time. And he seemed to be having fun taping a freewheeling interview with TNT, during which he declared that information was power in coaching - Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team - and those who don't use it are doomed to lose.

But when I sat down to talk to him in the Bunker - Cuban's wet-bar hideaway in the bowels of the American Airlines Center, the Mavericks' home court - it turned out he was still steaming that the team had lost the night before in overtime. He was also dealing with a more immediate frustration: he couldn't get anything to come up on the four plasma TVs or the front-projector screen on the wall across from the leather sofa where we were sitting. Clearly, the boss was not pleased, and no one was picking up the phone. All he wanted to do was show me HDNet or HDNet Movies, his channels. Would heads roll? Not quite. Cuban later told me he learned that the Center's satellite downlink was out that day, so his frenetic input switching was for naught.