Michael Gartenberg on Orb Networks’ Personal Media Portal
By Alexander Grundner |
December 27th, 2004
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Michael Gartenberg: “I’ve taken a little time off but have been spending it looking at some new technologies. One of the most interesting has been from Orb Networks. Orb promises to turn your PC, PDA and Smartphone into a mobile entertainment portal. Promising to deliver your music, pictures, video and live TV, Orb delivers quite well. The service is currently in beta and currently needs Windows Media Center (04 or 05) and a broadband connection. Remote clients include all MS Smartphones, PocketPC Phones, most connected pocket PCs and Symbian Series 60 and 70 phones. In short if it has a web browser and either REAL player or Windows Media it will work. Setup took less than 10 minutes. No sophisticated network knowledge required. One you get it configured, work it does. Using a WiFi enabled PocketPC I had no problem getting to a live TV stream, all my photos and all my music. Quality was surprisingly good. I was also able to connect over a smartphone using GPRS. Music streamed fine. Amazingly video worked as well but was hardly a quality experience but better than I have seen on other TV/Phone solutions. Using a 3G network would have worked much better I suspect. The Orb folks have done something amazing here and there are lots of uses. Like setting up Doppler to get my podcasts and streaming them from my phone in the car or watching local TV or recorded shows on the road. No sync needed. Service is 9.99 a month or 79.99 a year. Not cheap, but better than the price Sprint offers for their TV service and much cheaper and easier to use than things like Sony’s location-free TV. While the current version is enthusiast only for the moment, it easily could be mainstream over time. If you use Media Center PC and have a Smartphone or connected PDA, check this out. I suspect there will be more services competing with Orb in the future. For now Orb is here and it works.”
Seems like an application Windows Media Center users should try out, but a monthly service charge to make use of it… that’s a little absurd. I would be more interested in the product if they charged a one time $80 software download fee than having a $9.99 recurring monthly charge (Orb also offers $79.99 a year – additional user: $3.99mo or $29.99 a year). In any case good luck to Orb, but hopefully they’ll realize that consumers are tired of subscribing to multiple content services and will most likely look for more cost effective alternatives to provide the same service.
UPDATE: Okay, okay, I take back my harsh criticism of Orb Networks charging users a monthly service fee to use their product. After hearing Phillip Torrone’s comments on how well Orb works and the potential of the application to have a major shift on the way users consume/manage content (especially content they already own), not to mention the fact that Orb’s servers do all the heavy processing, I can’t help but change my position. However, I still believe the pricing could come down a little more, in particular the additional user fee.
Mike Nash – 2 hours 27 minutes ago