Walter Mossberg, of The Wall Street Journal, asked Mark Cuban yesterday about reports that he wants to buy the Chicago Cubs.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

Mention the name Mark Cuban, and most people will think of the impassioned owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, or perhaps a contestant on this season’s version of the ABC hit show Dancing With the Stars. But Cuban made his fortune as a high-tech entrepreneur, first in computer networking and then in Internet broadcasting.

“What I try to do is look where other people are not looking,” said Cuban, who was in Providence yesterday for a Collaboration Innovation Summit. “People are overly focused on the Internet right now, and they’re ignoring other opportunities. It’s all about content now. Look at where people are spending their money — it’s everywhere but the PC. It’s in consumer electronics, hi-def TVs, DVRs.”

Cuban, 49, now has a sports, entertainment, film, and a digital television empire that includes the Mavericks, a high-definition television network called HDNet, and a chain of movie theaters. Last year, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.3 billion.

As part of yesterday’s conference, Cuban was interviewed at Trinity Rep’s Lederer Theater in downtown Providence by Walter Mossberg, the Rhode Island native and influential personal technology writer for The Wall Street Journal.

Mossberg asked Cuban about reports he wanted to buy the Chicago Cubs. (Cuban told a Chicago radio station that if he owned the team, he would sit in the right-field bleachers.) “I’m interested, and I’m going through the qualification process,” said Cuban, looking boyish in polo shirt, jeans and sneakers. “If you can pick up an iconic brand like the Cubs, and link it with digital media, it’s a tremendous opportunity.”

During his career, Cuban said, he has tried to look at himself as a consumer: “I would ask what creates the path of least resistance to let your customers do what they want to do.”

In the ’80s, he said, it occurred to him that at some point people would want to link all those individual computers together, so he created a systems integration firm called MicroSolutions, then sold it for $6 million in 1990. Five years later, he and his partner, Todd Wagner, wanted to listen to Indiana University basketball games on the Internet, which led to the creation of an Internet broadcasting company called Broadcast.com, which they sold five years later to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in stock.

Yesterday, Mossberg asked Cuban whether the personal computer has peaked.

“There was a day when you were excited about the PC, and what was going to come out next. That day has passed,” Cuban said. Cuban said the greatest opportunity in the computer world now would be to create a new operating system that would be an improvement over both Microsoft and Apple. But he said he had too many other projects on his plate to try it himself.

Among them are HDNet, which now has 7 million subscribers and hired Dan Rather after the newsman resigned from CBS. HDNet, which started in 2001, is a mix of original programming, sports, concerts, and shows licensed from major studios, such as Arrested Development, Smallville and Star Trek: Enterprise, all broadcast in high definition.

Cuban said he saw the potential for high definition TV early on, even when sets cost $7,000 and more. Cuban said that he figured high-definition TV equipment would follow the path of the personal computer, with sharp decreases in price. Mossberg pointed out that traditional networks, such as NBC or CBS, are also broadcasting their signature shows in high definition. Sure, said Cuban — for a few hours a day. Try finding high-def programming at 3 p.m.

Cuban is that rare businessman who not only owns TV, he’s on TV. Cuban said he had practiced for Dancing with the Stars until midnight Wednesday night, and right after his engagement at the Innovation Summit yesterday he planned to fly back to his home in Dallas for another practice session.

“I saw it as a unique challenge. It was not something I was born to do,” he said. “I’ve always enjoyed challenges, and this is a chance to challenge myself physically. As you get older, it’s rare to find that kind of physical challenge. And it’s live TV. Either you do it or you don’t. How many times in our lives do we get to experience that?”

asmith@projo.com