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Analysis: Orb Networks personal streaming is now Free
Posted on Tuesday, March 29 @ 12:09:18 PST by lincomatic
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Orb Networks has decided to discontinue their subscription fee, so it may become a viable solution for streaming your media for use when away from home. Beware though, hardly anything is ever truly free....
Rather than a monthly subscription, the Orb service will be supported by ads and whatever data they can mine from their users and sell. It did seem rather silly that they thought people would be willing to pony up a monthly fee for the privilege of streaming their own media from their own machines, didn't it?
So how does Orb work? You download an app to a computer on your network which contains media. This app catalogs your media and acts as the actual streaming server. It communicates with Orb's servers, which act as a gateway to your content. To access your media, you log into Orb's secure web site and access it via a web page, much like the one that Andromeda serves out. Once you click on a stream, your own computer at home supposedly streams the media directly to your device.
The difference from running your own standalone streaming server is that they do the authentication. Therein lies the question: do you really want someone else to be able to track what media you own and play? Privacy aside, they don't actually host the files; the file are streamed directly from your own machines. Their servers are used for two purposes: 1) provide secure authentication for accessing your content 2) to index your content and serve up web pages which make it easy to select what content you want to stream.
Is there really any advantage to Orb's roundabout methodology over just setting up your own standalone streaming server? Not for the user, but by injecting their own servers into the mix, Orb are able to create a revenue stream for themselves to get rich.
In fact, adding Orb's servers into the mix just adds yet another point of failure; if their servers crash you can't get to your content even though your own computer which is hosting the files is still running.
I tried to install Orb 1.0 today on two computers, one running XP SP2, and one running XPMCE. It crashed on both of them and I could not get it to run. If anyone gets it running, please post comments on your experiences with it.
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