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The Whys and Don’ts of a Power Plant

AUSTIN, Texas–In a packed conference room at the Austin Convention Center, two high-profile figures in new media took the stage for a highly anticipated interview, and neither one was Mark Zuckerberg.

Rather, it was billionaire entrepreneur and former Dancing with the Stars contestant Mark Cuban interviewing former Disney CEO and current Web video entrepreneur Michael Eisner at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

“I’m the moderator, which I’m not used to being,” Cuban quipped. “We learned a lot from watching the Mark Zuckerberg interview,” he added jokingly, “so I’ll just talk about me.”

But for the most part (minus a lengthy monologue about the difficulties of interactivity on the Web), Cuban left the floor to Eisner to talk about The All-for-Nots, a new Web-based video series created by his new-media production company, Vuguru.

The series, which he describes as “a Spinal Tap-ish kind of rock ‘n’ roll thing” about a fictional indie-rock band from Brooklyn, was created in conjunction with the production team behind the popular video show The Burg.

It’s a far cry from his days at the helm of Disney. But, the media mogul said, “I like experiments.”

“Those people working now in (online video) are going to be the Steven Spielbergs of the next generation.”

–Michael Eisner

Eisner’s investment group, Tornante, launched Vuguru a year ago along with its inaugural series, the teen drama Prom Queen. Despite promotion on MySpace.com and Eisner’s name value, the former Disney chief admitted several months later that the endeavor “didn’t make money” and that he believed Web video was still several years away from profitability.

Yet he’s moving forward with The All-for-Nots. “One of the things that we thought would be interesting in my company was to see if the time had come for story-driven professional content to find a place on the Internet, possibly be monetized, to see where the business was heading,” Eisner said. “It’s been an interesting experience, and we’ve learned a lot.”

Eisner told Cuban and the audience that he’s pushing ahead in online video because it’s going to pay to be a pioneer. “All of a sudden, we’re going to wake up, and professionally driven content…for the Internet is going to explode,” Eisner said. Later, he added, “Those people working now in it are going to be the Steven Spielbergs of the next generation.”

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