Orb Networks Makes Your iPhone ROCK!

Ok, that's a stretch right now, but it's definitely getting there.

A special shout out to Yohan Le Nerriec, Orb's chief architect and the rest of the development team at Orb Networks. Orb seem to be on a mission to make streaming work with the iPhone even before the Flash update (which according to Walt Mossberg will probably be available within 60 days).

I know Orb's goal is not specifically to make me happy, but it works out that way. Orb's slogan is "Media Freedom", so we are very philosophically aligned.

Orb has already made updates so that I can stream MP3. It's early days, and I can't "shuffle all" or run a playlist, but I can stream individual files over WiFi and over WiFi, it's not slow to access the individual files.

I can even stream some of my MP4 and M4V videos – it's nowhere near an ideal circumstance yet, but for less than a week after the launch of the iPhone, it's definitely very cool progress!

In terms of "media freedom":

• Pictures: fully liberated
• Music: Fully Liberated (on a song by song basis. as long as it's unprotected .MP3)
• Video: definite progress – which is more than I can say for the Sony PSP's stand alone browser
• My TV wherever I am: TBD
  

Considering I can't stream video to the PSP's browser via WiFi at all (and it's been out a couple of years) without buying additional hardware, I think this is great progress after only one week of iPhone availability. Orb only runs on Windows, but whether you have a TV tuner card or not, if you have a lot of pictures or MP3s or Video on your hard drive and a broadband connection, it's definitely worth checking out at http://www.orb.com/

You Have to be Kidding Me! More iPhone, PSP, ORB, Streaming Video, etc

A couple of years ago I met a young woman and I took a very strong shine to her because her response to almost every travesty in the world, no matter how major, no matter how minor, was exactly the same: you have to be kidding me!

I realized after a short time that, "Goodness, that's my response to every travesty in the world, no matter how major or minor."

I have been attempting a shift where I reserve that response for other things. Not necessarily major travesties. I can tell you right now that performance enhancing drugs in professional sports are not considered any real travesty by the masses, and that's why they are still in use today. If you could blood test all the MLB players right now, I predict more than half of them would test positive for HGH (human growth hormone). You can't test for HGH without a blood test, and blood testing is not currently a part of MLB's collective bargaining agreement with the MLBPA. If anyone really cared to actually fix the problem right now, they'd find a way to get blood testing right now. This doesn't happen and likely won't until someone besides me, in a real position of power views it as a travesty and is hell-bent on fixing it. Let's face it Bud Selig and the players are not hell bent on fixing the problem, they are more bent on "not being stained by it". It's human nature. Ever it was…

It's no travesty, but I am ok with a "you have to be kidding me!" response to it because, especially in the coming weeks approaching the MLB All-Star game here in San Francisco, home of Barry Bonds there will be lots of talk, talk, talk with no actual "fixing of the problem". Fans are decidedly not voting with their wallets based on ticket sale trends over the last ten years. And it's the rub of trying to fix the problem. If we found out the real results are that more than half the players are using HGH who is that information good for? Not the players, not the owners and not the fans. I think we're in some classic "ignore it until it goes away" scenario with a lot of jibber jabber about doing something that really just amounts to jibber jabber. So of course, travesty or not: you have to be kidding me!

Then there's stuff like having a nice Playstation Portable (PSP) that would be able to receive wifi streams of all my media, except the nefarious scoundrels at Sony don't want you to have that much capability for their ~$150 device. You have to buy either a ~$200 add-on (Sony's Location Free Player) or a $600 add-on, the PS3. There's no reason it has to work that way at all, Sony set it up that way on purpose. So of course, "You have to be kidding me!" I bought both the add-ons though I didn't buy the PS3 with that in mind. Someday there definitely will be a very cool portable device that streams video from your home media library very nicely for less than $200, but it might be a few years. I don't really fault Sony as I do not believe they would have already sold millions more or even a 100,000 more PSPs if they had done this.

Here, it's me who is the hypocrite because I just contribute to the problem. Sony is a unique company in that it's business decisions really do make it look like it's run by a bunch of scoundrels, but their products are so good, people by them. I have a high end Vaio sub notebook, the PS3, the location free player, etc. That I sometimes view the Sony Corporation as a bunch of evil imperialists doesn't matter at all. If someone said they could only buy one Microsoft Windows based laptop, I would recommend the Vaio brand. Of course when the Apple Store moves into its Chestnut Street location, I'm for sure going with an Apple based laptop when it's finally time for me to upgrade. Take that Sony!

One of the most interesting things to me is that when I was writing ten years ago, Microsoft was a very interesting company to follow and write about. I don't know whether it's just me, but I no longer find this to be the case at all. I use Microsoft products, Vista and the Xbox360 and they are both fine products, but Microsoft the company, like Sony the company just isn't all that interesting. I like their products but don't find anything they're doing particularly notable. On the other hand, I find Google and Apple absolutely fascinating.

Google it seems is out to optimize everything. I'm not sure I'll live long enough to see OY.Google.com (with the OY standing for "Optimize Yourself" rather than a kvetchy oy), but I don't doubt they are on that trajectory at all. Apple, well, Apple seems way better at optimizing portability/remote access than anyone else with the iPod, and presumably with the forthcoming iPhone. When you couple some future version of the stand alone ipod that is an 80GB (or more) version with wifi? In 5 years when all that is hooked into the 3^rd generation of "Steve's Little Hobby™, AppleTV – I won't be the only one in Starbucks watching TV on my iPod. Steve will take an "aww shucks' approach to that success. If I had to pick right now who is going to own the "media server" space that will stream your content wherever you want it (whether it's your HDTV, the TV in your office, your computer at work, your iPod..) I don't see it being Microsoft or Sony.

Of course I may well be hugely wrong. Ten years ago there was no Google and I didn't think the future looked bright at all for Apple. But Steve Jobs came back, then the iPod, now the iPhone and…because of all that, Apple, in my opinion is likely to grow its market share in the personal computer space (and while it's not exactly a zero sum game, improved market share for Apple will come almost entirely at the expense of Microsoft).

These are exciting times.

For now Orb on a Microsoft Media Center machine provides a vastly richer and better experience than Steve's Little Hobby™, but in a few years there will be more options, all of them much better than any of the options.

Until then: getting all my media wherever I want it, whenever I want it, on any device I want it: miserably hard to do!! Please note, there are many good solutions in place if all you want to do is stream your video to a laptop, but if you want it wherever you are whenever you are, it's going to be a pain in the butt probably at least until version 3 of Apple TV (~5 years).

The stories I will be able to tell about "the old days" will have a strong resemblance to, "I had to walk 10 miles to school, through the snow, without shoes…" People will say, "You have to be kidding me!" I won't be kidding at all.

For now, having seen today's battery life announcement for the iPhone, I think I may well pass on passing on the iPhone. But I will definitely pass on being a fool standing in line on 6/29. You have to be kidding me!

The Evil Sony Imperialists

I wanted to be wrong about Sony. I knew I wasn't so I went ahead and wrote this piece anyway, before I had all of the data. But I really did have all the data -- I just didn't have any way to know 100% for sure. But now I do.

I heard from Yohan Le Nerriec, the chief architect at Orb and he confirmed my suspicions that I couldn't stream ORB to my normal PSP browser because Sony used closed protocols in their regular browser that ORB and others can't tap into.

The Sony solution for streaming ORB -- something that should work RIGHT AWAY on the PSP anyway is a $600 ad-on known as the PS3. That's right, if you want to stream video from ORB to your PSP, it can be done -- but it requires a $600 ad-on in the middle. You have to use the remote play feature of the PS3 to stream Orb -- and the remote play feature is not currently stable.

It so happens I had the PS3 anyway and it really is a cool gaming console. But I shouldn't need a $600 ad-on to make ORB work.

But Sony is evil like that. If it was simply a stupid business decision made out of stupidity, it wouldn't bother me. But this is how Sony operates. Always deliberately trying to make you pay even MORE for what you already paid for (I already paid $199 for the PSP) and there's no technological reason why the regular browser couldn't stream video except for this. Sony doesn't want you to have THAT much capability in a $200 product. They want you to pay MORE for that feature. $600 more in this case.

Yikes!

On a separate note, I wonder if they let Paris bring her PSP to jail....robert seidman

Put Your TV on Your Ipod (My e-mail to Steve Jobs)

From: Robert Seidman
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2007 4:28 PM
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Put Your TV on Your iPod!

Dear Mr. Jobs,

I have watched with great interest just how smooth you’re being with your little “hobby”. I’m on to you though!

I think it’s prudent to say exactly what you’re saying for a lot of reasons. Primarily, this time around Apple showed up to the party much earlier than it did with MP3. In the space of “home media servers” or “get your media wherever you want it”, these are very early days. Things with “get your media wherever you want it” are effectively where MP3 was back in 1998 or 1999 (in the dark days before iPods). People are screwing around with home media and streaming, and putting video on their iPods and other devices. There are many products you can buy, but it isn’t sweeping the nation yet. For similar reasons as why MP3 was such a pain in the butt in the late ‘90s– it’s still too complex. There’s much more broadband these days, but on the other hand the file size of an episode of 24 downloaded from iTunes is more than ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY TIMES LARGER than the file size of your typical 4 minute song(mp3).

I’m the only person I know – and this in the San Francisco Marina district – home of Pacific Catch calamari on Chestnut St (and really, you need to try the chili encrusted calamari at Betelnut on Union St. – way, way better!) and future home of most iPhones/capita – with all that, I am the only guy I know who turned my iPod into an incredible video on demand product with more than a week’s worth of continuous programming. I’m also interested in getting my media wherever I want it and to this end have played with Orb, Slingbox, Location Free player, Tivo, Media Centers, media extenders, etc.

I get that all AppleTV, your little hobby, is today is just another media extender albeit one that was designed to work with iTunes. But I’m pretty sure you’re not being forthcoming at all about your true plans for AppleTV. I think it’s smart, and I don’t see the upside in you fully disclosing. But I’m on to you.

It’s smart for you to say it’s a hobby right now. It lowers expectations, puts the content producers and the Comcasts of the world at ease and allows you to fly under the radar. By the time version 2.0 comes out, the language from you will probably change to “It’s still a hobby, but one we’re very passionate about. Will we replace Comcast? Of course not! We just hope to be able to offer Comcast customers something that will make their Comcast experience even a little bit better! We’ll work with Comcast as much as possible.”

By version 3 of Apple TV (~ 5 years from now) though – it’s no hobby. it will have a DVR, you’ll be able to do pay-per-view on it, you’ll be able to order content directly via the AppleTV (instead of needing to go to iTunes first) and, you will be able to receive, over the internet some kind of television programming package that DIRECTLY competes with the Comcasts and DirectTVs). For LESS money than you pay Comcast or DirectTV. Adding massive bandwidth to support that is much cheaper than launching satellites or laying your own cable. Apple has no legacy infrastructure – a great position to be in.

Even by version 3, Comcast isn’t exactly going to be crapping its pants, but it will be out of the realm of hobby and it will be a real business.

Separately I believe something else will happen. The iPod that is in the forthcoming iPhone will ultimately be released as some sort of stand alone iPod that doesn’t have a phone. It will have the wider screen and wifi though. Probably a bigger hard drive will replace the phone components. I believe this product, to the degree there is a standard for “portable video”, will be the standard.

5 years from now there may well be 10 million of those yet-to-be-released iPods in the world. And one of the selling points of AppleTV by then will be: “Put your TV on your iPod…easily!”

Connecting all the dots, Apple is going to be a major player in the “home media” space and in the space that’s of particular interest to me “all your media, wherever you want it”. I don’t think there are that many people like me today, but in 5 years from now there will be at least a million people like me. A million people who are spending ~$2000 a year for video media between Cable, DVD, movies, etc . -- this does not include the ~$600/year for high speed internet or any of the hardware gadgets..

In 5 years, I imagine I’ll get some kind of e-mail from you saying, “Look, just give ME that $2000 and I’ll give you EVERYTHING you already have, plus – it will automatically be on your iPod either by synching or streaming over Wifi. I’m going to make it all very easy for you!

Where do I sign? That’s what I’ll be asking along with the 999,999 other people like me. And so what, even if I am wrong by one order of magnitude and 5 years…who cares? Not you, I imagine.

And unbelievably, hovering near $125, I want to go LONG AAPL. Word to your mom, that’s bad news at least in the short term for AAPL. If you want to trade, do exactly OPPOSITE of what I say. I shorted AAPL @ $52 last July and covered at $60. With my special brand of Seidman Math, seeing AAPL at $125 I still think I’m a genius for having he sense to cut my losses fast. Should’ve road it up though – duh. But I see the future – my version of it anyway, which can’t be that far off from yours really – and in that future I’d be long AAPL. Since YOU are the one with the special skills for “that vision thing”, I’m sure I’ll ultimately like YOUR version much, much better than my own.**

Hardware products like the iPhone, the iPod and personal computers are great. But monthly subscription revenue streams are very tantalizing. As is getting whatever media I want wherever I want it. Right now I’m the only one who cares. In the late 80s, I was one of the only people who cared that something like “email” existed. Ten years later the world caught up with me. It will catch up with me here too. It’s just a question of when.

I can’t wait.

Sincerely,

Robert Seidman
rseidman.blogspot.com
**anyone reading this who is not Steve Jobs: please don't make any investment or financial decisions on the basis of my commentary!! (remember I shorted AAPL @ $52 and it's @ $125!

Still Stinging Over Betamax (Why Sony Still Can’t Help But Suck Sometimes)

There’s a fabulous gadget called the Playstation Portable (PSP). It’s a great product, especially for one that’s already at least a couple of years old with no hardware updates. The thing plays games, it hooks up to the internet via wifi (where you can play games with other people or surf the web), you can watch video on it and you can play games head to head vs. other people who have a PSP. It’s a cool gadget.

Streaming video to this gadget over the internet is problematic though, in fact, until very recently the only way to do this was by purchasing one of Sony’s Location Free players (which I did). I don’t love the Location Free Player but my primary issue with that is that most of my “media” is managed via 2 Microsoft Media Center PC’s which the Location Free Player will not integrate with. Fortunately I had a couple of old tivo series 2 lying around that it worked just fine with and I could more or less access my media center through tivo’s networking remotely just fine. Kind of klunky but it worked.

There’s also a fabulous free software service from Orb Networks called Orb. Orb is effectively a software solution to do what things like Slingbox and Location Free Player do.

With the Orb software installed on your media center PC you have complete access to all your media files (video, pictures, music, and even RSS feeds) remotely. You can access with a laptop, a cell phone, any device that can stream video from the Internet and watch remotely. You can even watch live TV remotely though given buffering, you will be shifted by at least a few seconds,

My dream that the ORB would work with the PSP has come true. Kind of. Sony has a good web browser built into the PSP, but accessing the ORB that way works – I can see all my stuff just fine. I can even look at pictures, but video streaming does not work. Sony recently launched an upgraded version of “Remote Play” allowing me to assign a PSP to my PS3 (that’s right, the $600 game console). Because I actually have one of these I can do the following:

- Use my PSP remotely to access my PS3 over the internet.
- Bring up the browser from my PS3 remotely on the Internet.
- Connect to the ORB from my PS3’s web browser (remotely via the PSP)
- Voila! Streaming video to the PSP.

But I already had the $199 version of the PSP (It’s down to around $169 I believe) that comes with a fine Web browser. Sony doesn’t want you to use it for streaming though – not at least without buying one of their other products.

For those of you who thought this was going to be some Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD, discussion, sorry to disappoint you. I love high definition, but I have to be honest, it just doesn’t matter to me in terms of DVDs, not yet anyway. Although I have a Blu-ray on my PS3, I never got around to buying a single Blue-ray DVD so I never got around to buying the HD-DVD upgrade for the XBOX 360 because I just don’t care that much about high definition DVDs.

Sony is plain boneheaded here. You want to encourage people to get addicted to streaming – you don’t want to create barriers that make it harder. Needing to buy a $600 add-on (the PS3) to get it to work…that seems like a barrier. Additionally, sad to say, “Remote Play” isn’t anywhere near a stable environment. The ORB itself is far more stable.

The only place the streaming really works right now is in my home because I’m constantly having to restart the remote play on the PS3 (you can’t do this via remote play, you need to physically use the PS3) to get it to work. If I were actually operating remotely, without access to my PS3, odds of it working even once are about 1 in 3, odds of it working a second time are asymptotically approaching zero.

I’m sure Sony can and will improve this but the better improvement would be allowing the PSP to work with ORB directly without needing the PS3 involved.

Total into Sony: $600 for the PS/3
$200 for Location Free
$200 for the PSP

When I look at it that way, I just expect the freaking streaming experience to be pleasant. It isn’t. Thanks, Sony!

I think Sony develops great products usually. I like their stuff and would feel comfortable shelling out the extra for a Sony sub notebook because they are so good with products. But when it comes to integration, they make a lot of dopey business decisions and always have.

I'll Pass on the iPhone

I won’t be standing in line to sign up to buy an Iphone on June 20th if this report is accurate.

I marveled at the pretty iPhone that rotated 360 while secured in a lucite case at Mac World this past January. You’d have thought it was the Mona Lisa. I wanted one really badly, and if I could’ve bought one right then and there I would’ve.

But now I’ve had several months to think about it, and I think I’ll pass. At least for a while and maybe forever. I think it’s easy to reckon that people will like this product, but that doesn’t mean it will be a particularly useful product for me.

I haven’t had anything resembling a real job in nearly 5 years, so the phone can have a gazillion features to make your workday more productive, but most of those probably won’t be that interesting to me.

The features that impressed me were not because of the phone, but because of the iPod. Quite simply, from a features point of view, the iPhone will have the best available iPod product. For one, it will be the first iPod with a larger display (roughly 2x the current video iPod display) and secondly, it will be the first iPod with WiFi. To me, that DOES make it a hot gadget, but still not necessarily useful.

I am a huge media enthusiast. I have been experimenting with a lot of video formats both portable and streaming. I have used my Play Station Portable (PSP) remotely and streamed video via wifi over Sony’s Location Free Player. I have streamed all of my media via Orb via wifi to my laptop – it’s very cool. And I have sat in coffee shops in San Francisco on gray days like today and watched hours and hours of Boston Legal on my iPod.

I love the form factor of the iPhone. That it’s a phone, and an iPod, and that size is great. But here’s the thing. Power consumption for cell phones is tricky. My PSP, like my iPod will normally give me many hours (5+) for normal usage. But if I turn on the PSP’s wifi, I don’t get nearly as much battery life. The same is also true with my laptop, I get much better battery life when I am not running Wifi.

And all of that’s fine, even for the iPhone, but the problem is that if I am out watching 24 on my PSP, or Boston Legal on my iPod, if the PSP or iPod battery dies or gets very low I don’t really care. But I do care if the battery on my phone runs out. Quite a lot. To do what I’d really want to do with it, there’s no doubt in my mind it will drain power too much to be useful.

That said, the iPhone comes with 8 gigabytes of storage and I can get a lot of video onto 8 gigs and video playback itself probably isn’t as likely to drain the battery as wifi usage. But to buy this product without a phone service plan (and I really wouldn’t want the phone) is probably going to be ~$600 and I don’t really see paying $600 for the first release of a product I’m likely to use less than 18 months, because within that time there will be both an improved iPhone and an improved iPod (that I’m guessing will come with the bigger screen, the wifi, but without the phone…but it will only cost around ~$350. Just a guess, but that’s the price for the current high end iPod, and I don’t think that’s likely to change much anytime soon.

In the meanwhile I wish folks would stop focusing on building better mousetraps and that someone would build better batteries!

Battery life is really the key to a multi-featured product like the iPhone, because actually having the phone available is really important to people. If the first iPhone will allow me to stream video even 30 minutes a day over wifi, use my phone as I normally would and only charge my phone once a day as I do now, they’ve done a great job.

My expectation is that they didn’t do that great of a job. Not because they didn’t try like hell, but because of limitations of battery technology and the way cell phones and wifi consume power. We’ll know in a month.