For the Love of Orb (and Slingbox, Too!)

This is a very long piece on media liberation otherwise known as easy media portability. This is more rough (and mostly completely unedited) thinking on these topics. What's covered: some of the barriers in general, a brief Orb vs. Slingbox comparison, more 'put your TV on your iPod', and some "Fear of Apple".

There are some Slingbox lovers out there. Some Orb lovers too. There aren't enough of us though. In both cases I think the barrier is currently too steep to reach mass adopter status and not just because either of the products are particularly hard to use, or represent unsolvable technological challenges, but instead because of how people think about stuff and the barriers involved with changing behavior.

The barriers are so hard. For instance, at least the last time I checked, most of the HDTVs hadn't wound up actually hooked up to any type of a set top box (STB) that could provide an HD signal. So you're talking about something were even when someone probably paid more than $1000, the people who bought it didn't wind up ordering the thing from their cable or satellite provider that would actually utilize fully what they just paid for. We can be very strange people.

This challenge may make you scratch your head. It might make you think "nah", but look it up. I think the cable and satellite companies have both stepped up in marketing their HD offerings, so this is changing now. But as of last year, MOST HDTVs were not hooked up to any HD content.

Most "Microsoft Media Center PCs" don't even likely wind up ever getting used as a Media Center PC. Many people buy laptops and desktops without even knowing (or knowing and not caring) that it's a Media Center PC. The first Media Center machine I bought was accidental. I had no idea it was a media center PC until I'd unboxed it and saw it had a TV tuner card built in. Since I had cable already in that room for Internet access, I split the cable and checked it out. I liked it. Then I started experimenting with ORB, and I liked it even more. But I do still have some geeky instincts (I thought I'd lost it for a while), and I like playing around with media portability and figuring out how to get it to work. Most people don't operate like that and never will.

This is even more complex than the traditional challenge of marketing something. Traditional models would be more like AOL and Quicken coming bundled on the Computer. Usually most people ignore most of this stuff too, however, AOL and Quicken can do something that doesn't make any sense for Microsoft to do with the Media Center PCs. AOL and Quicken can send you a post card (or a new shiny CD in the case of AOL) and this marketing makes sense, because if you act on it, these guys know what happens: they get paid.

Microsoft would have gotten more attention if they charged $9.95 a month to actually make the media center usable as a DVR. If it would have charged for the program Guide like TIVO does, way more people would've heard about it because if that would have happened, MSFT would have spent some money on sending people who bought Media Center PCs a postcard. On the other hand, I'm glad they didn't, because having a couple of lifetime program guides with Tivo, I would have probably not tried the Media Center's DVR out.. Similarly, I'm glad that ORB didn't ever charge me a fee.

On the other hand these are the exact same reasons that nobody has really heard of ORB or the Microsoft Media Center. I don't know how important it is for Microsoft to be perceived at the forefront of this or whether it should be important to Microsoft. I conclude that for ORB, its decision is it would rather wait for the right time than burn tens of millions of dollars in marketing as Slingbox must do.

ORB vs. Slingbox

Media Liberation is the concept that if I somehow paid for media already and can store it for my own personal use legally, I ought to be able to have access to it wherever I am.

I have gotten questions from more than one person on why I love ORB so much more than Slingbox. If you already have a TIVO and your goal is to be able to watch live or recorded tv from some remote location, I love Slingbox as much as I love ORB. You want to watch on a laptop, even some phones (sadly, not the iPhone) or any computer connected to the Internet (again, sadly no iPhones), I don't have a problem with Slingbox, though if you want it to work on your Sony PSP, you're better off going with Sony's Location Free Player or whatever they have decided to call this product these days (it's basically a Slingbox made by Sony).

There are two reasons I personally prefer ORB to Slingbox. One, it allows me to fully conceptualize in every way the notion of a media server. Secondly, while Slingbox and its ilk will give me easy remote access to live or recorded tv, I have much more than that in my digital media library. All my songs, pretty much any picture I've ever taken and decided to keep since 1997, live and recorded television, and movies and other DVD-style compliations.

Slingbox only lets me get at a piece of that, but I'd say on an application specific basis, especially if you are already set up with a DVR and all that you want to do is get remote access to live and recorded TV. Slingbox is the not only the path of least resistance, unless you already have a TV tuner card and a version of Microsoft Windows that supports Media Center, Slingbox is cheaper.

As it happened, I did already have a Media Center PC, so I played around with it. While I don't love (or hate) the Media Center interface, I do find the version in Vista an improvement, but in terms of remote access, I do love ORB, because unlike Slingbox, it puts the concept in my head of "put all the stuff I paid for here" and get it whenever/wherever I want. I am very enamored with this concept, and in the end whether content is all physically in one place or whether it's virtually distributed, as long as I can ultimately get to it all easily through one interface, I'll be satisfied. For me, ORB is the thing that most enables the "future vision". But there are yet more barriers than "what's ORB's business model going to be exactly?" I honestly don't know currently and "hope Yahoo lightening strikes twice and Orb.Com becomes the Broadcast.Com of the 2000s!" But there are bigger barriers with the consumers than Orb's business model.

Nobody Really Cares Yet, Including Apple

But for now, while WiFi isn't really free and ubiquitous...how much should Apple care yet?

In theory, the widescreen iPhone (and ultimately stand alone iPod) will be the most popular portable media device ever. But it doesn't easily support streaming presently, I will not be shocked if Apple's implementation of Macromedia's FLASH player for the iPhone still blocks me from streaming live TV. Fortunately for Apple, I was already braced because of Sony. Sony, whose PSP did ultimately get around to supporting FLASH, still managed to block streaming protocols. I can stream to my PSP, but only via additional hardware: Sony's location Free Player, or by a convoluted process where I use the PSP to connect with my Playstation 3 at home, and then use the Playstation 3's web browser to access ORB.

While I realize there is some interest in this, especially among enthusiasts and early adopters, for most people the last paragraph just causes their eyes to roll into the back of their heads. We're clearly still in the early adopter stage with some of this stuff and as a result, interoperability is a big issue that causes too much complexity and costs too much. This is a big barrier.

Ubiquitous access to more or less fast Internet. With the iPhone as it is, if Wifi isn't an option, neither is streaming. While ORB can detect your network speed and size the file appropriately, even if the iPhone currently supported streaming seamlessly, I believe because the Edge network is so slow, the results would be poor. However, I'll be shocked if the next generation of iPhone doesn't come with access to AT&T's faster network and on that network, you could get watchable video on a regular basis.

One barrier aside from interoperability and cost is that none of the installed base of the most popular portable media player currently available (iPhone/iPod) can stream anything. So my vision of all this is still at least a couple of generations more of iPods. And you can be sure the very next generation will include a widescreen/touch screen model. Whether that generation has WiFi is the $64,000 question.

The sooner it does, the sooner my vision will start to take root, and that vision is:

Put Your TV on your iPhone/iPod

Or portable media player of your choice. The one big mistake I think Apple made with the video iPod was not loading the iPods with some video content so that people could get accustomed to the notion of portable video. I did some experiments with loading up iPods and loaning them to people. Anyone I could get to use it, seemed to like it quite a bit. But not everyone was interested in trying it out. But the people who did like it and there were several, wished it was easy to get stuff off their DVRs and onto their iPods and iPhones.

For most people, it's way too hard. I have to be honest, it's often way too hard from me, and I confess on occasion I have downloaded files off the internet. I rationalize the ethics like this: the process of getting it from my DVR to my portable device is lousy. So lousy that it's easier and faster to download it. I can't buy a service to do this. I can't get it from Comcast, Apple*, Tivo, Microsoft or anybody. Maybe Facebook will offer it for $8.95 a month and then I can stand in the "I love Facebook" line like everyone else around here.

*You can subscribe to certain TV shows via iTunes and download them already in iPod format. However, these files are optimized for your TV and will playback in DVD quality should you happen to have an AppleTV, they are not optimized for the small screen and small hard drive and they aren't optimized for cramming as much video content that looks great as you possibly can. Ultimately, this will be resolved either via bigger and bigger flash drives to the point where it wouldn't matter to most people, or Apple and others will figure out how to let the software automatically optimize the content

some stuff you can do with the Zune (though I think it might be through a 3^rd party and not Microsoft) is set up to easily transfer shows you have recorded to the Zune. But the Zune as it exists presently is dead, totally killed off by the iPhone and future generations of iPods. If Microsoft doesn't get it yet, they will soon. Form factor matters and an iPhone fits in any pocket you have way better than a Zune. While Sony is taking its sweet time with the Playstation Portable 2, it's at least making the PSP 1 thinner.

I made an offhand comment to a friend that I thought the iPhone form factor wins, even ultimately for gaming, but I'm not so sure. While I don't get much increased value watching video on the PSP's bigger screen (it's at least a 3^rd bigger than the iPhone's), I haven't played Tiger Woods Golf on the smaller screen. Whether they can get the PSP more iPhone-esque in stature, I don't know but Sony is definitely on to slimming the device, and Microsoft will get there with Zune.

Fear of Apple: Who Will be its Main Competition?

I'm fearful that Apple is locking me in to an all Apple world. It's not a conspiracy, and I don't think I am being paranoid. Apple figured out how to design and manufacture really good portable media players. Now they baked in the phone and the Web browser and the integration is very cool. And because I have to have a phone anyway, and loved and heavily used an iPod already, and love reading stuff on the Web, the integration works out very cool, but that it winds up being such a great "portable DVD" replacement for me personally is more than just icing on the cake.

Apple isn't exactly notorious for being an open platform, and with the iPhone I am already forced into using iTunes for syncing, they probably will ultimately lock me in because as my library is increasingly in iTunes, if Apple can give me a DVR that can then iTunes can figure out how to optimize it for the iPhone and transfer it and charge me for it, that would currently be my path of least resistance.

I conceptually hate the notion of being locked into Apple's products, but as long as its products are actually better my hatred will remain merely conceptual.

Because of "Facebook lovin'", I saw the story where Facebook had acquired a company called Parakey which is run by the people who created the Firefox web browser software and is something called a Web Operating System (WebOS, I think is the correct Jargon). I am too far out of the technology loop to fully grasp what this means, but I think what it means is that someone could manufacture a device with a small video screen (say 3.5") and some flash storage and wifi and have it boot up to a web browser that can also serve as a file access interface (so you can store and then access files on the device for playback). If you threw in a cool touch screen interface and could sell it for around ~$300-$349 and theoretically make some money, I think there's an opportunity – to become the anti-Apple, and build this device to support anything and everything. All file formats, and whatever streams. Make it so the device doesn't care whether you have an Orb or a Slingbox, then market it like crazy to people with Slingbox, ORB, PSP, etc.

Sure, theoretically Apple could just open up to all of that too, though I can't imagine Apple feels like it needs to worry about it right now one way or the other. I think the next generation of AppleTV will give a pretty good signal of what Apple is in a hurry to deal with. If it doesn't change much over the previous model other than some of the specs and it doesn't add-in DVR capabilities of any kind, Apple isn't in a big hurry. I think it may still actually be too early for Apple to care. But I expect the next generation of widescreen iPods will be a big hit, and hopefully that will spur the movement.

I believe the bigger touch screen is the huge leap for the iPod and for the top of the line model, I do not expect the form factor or overall design will change from that version forward very much. They'll have to suck you into the new models with "more flash storage" and "faster WiFi" and "seamless Apple TV integration".

For the average person, the best answer is probably to just wait until Comcast and Apple, Tivo, Orb and who knows, Facebook and Pownce are offering you easier ways to deal with your portable media. By the time you're seeing more than one offer to take your money in return for making your life simpler, the hardware options will all be very much better than they are today and it should be reasonably easy to put your TV on your iPod.

Whether that's all 5, 10 or more years away, I don't know. Hoping that it's 5…

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/

Why AAPL Will be Higher in 5 Years

Disclosure: I'm almost always wrong 20% of the time. I use the 80-20 rule and strive to have 100 opinions a day. Usually at least 20 are wrong. It's an absolutely fantastic way to learn though. When it comes to the stock market, while my opinions are fewer, I'm probably only right 20% of the time. But I think this is the 1 out of 5.

Why I love Apple Computer

I'm sure my friend Bill G. and my old friend Mark Hurst will get a chuckle out of this. They'll ask me what took me so long. But this isn't about the reasons they love Apple. They actually love the computers Apple makes. Bill G., he couldn't care less about an iPod, bizarre as that may sound. I can go more bizarre. Hurst didn't even own a TV when I met him. I finally talked him into letting me dump an old 20" set on him before I moved to California. I played up the fact that he sometimes liked movies and he could hook a VCR up to it (these were still pre-DVD days). Much has transpired, and I'm pretty sure Hurst has a TV now, but…I wouldn't bet any money on it.

Bill and Mark have their reasons for loving Apple. I have my own.

Steve Jobs. He really does have that vision thing. there is much more in the 'read more..'

Real Steve Jobs. He's the only executive out there on a large scale that I see as really being ahead of the curve. His quest for total world domination is just beginning. The iPhone will have to be a huge flop which is possible, I suppose, but I'll be surprised. What I think will happen is the phone will have some issues, but they'll get addressed in V2 and the juggernaut that is Steve Jobs and Apple will just keep juggernauting.

Here's one way he's ahead of the curve. Nice handheld device that works with WiFi that (allegedly) has a relatively good battery life. This reason alone has me considering V1 very strongly. Because of Steve Jobs I will almost certainly be saying bye-bye to Verizon as my cell phone provider.

Verizon doesn't offer WiFi, though they do have a fairly fast network for accessing the Internet from your phone. The phone I have will absolutely stream windows media. Except that Verizon blocked that from regular Internet Web access. Verizon wants you to pay $14.95 a month for its VCast service with a very limited offering. Verizon will try to tell you that the offering is not limited, but quite robust. But it's not.

My basis of comparison is that if they would have just let me stream via the Windows Media Center, I could've had access to every channel of my cable box, everything stored on my DVR and everything in my media library (music and video). VCast is not robust compared to a scaled down cable or satellite offering, it's certainly not robust compared to what I have access to. It's really not robust compared to anything other than itself.

Verizon would have been better off selling freaks like me who are way, way ahead of this curve unlimited access to its network for $14.95 a month. I would've paid for it and probably wouldn't have wound up using it much at all. I can tell what a hit success VCast has been by looking at Verizon's last quarterly report (for the period ending 3/31/07). There is exactly ZERO mention of VCast in the earnings report. My guess is when the numbers come out for Q2, again, there will be ZERO mention of VCast. And that I would be willing to bet on. $100 anyway.

Now the iPhone comes along. I don't care about how fast AT&T's network is for data. I don't care that there's no 3G – because it has WiFi. In San Francisco WiFi isn't quite ubiquitous, just nearly so much so that usually I wouldn't notice the difference. The iPhone solves 2 problems: one it's a handheld multimedia device AND a hand held Internet appliance that will work pretty much wherever I am. If it works anywhere near as well as advertised (which is by no means a given), it will be a huge success.

There is the small problem where I switched from what was AT&T (Cingular) to Verizon because although I live in an urban area, when I had Cingular I rarely got any bars in my home. Hopefully they have corrected that by now.

The launch of the iPhone kills VCast off as far as I'm concerned and it was dead on arrival to begin with. This is no big deal. Verizon doesn't do "that vision thing", but what telco does? Verizon had a chance at the iPhone and initially I thought they were smart for passing. Jobs wants Apple calling all the shots. I wonder if Jobs talked AT&T into including the Apple logo on the monthly statement. That would make the transition more seamless when they get around to taking the AT&T logo off. Ok, I jest. Kind of.

Killing a deader than dead VCast is no big deal, but this is: Apple's iTunes Store is now the 3^rd largest retailer of music, passing Amazon. That's right, someone selling DIGITAL music, is the 3^rd largest retailer of music. Apple has about 10% of the market (9.8%) trailing only Wal-Mart (15.8%) and Best Buy (13.8%). All this really means right now is a few things:

1. Digital music sales represent at least 10% of the whole pie
2. Distribution is so fragmented that you can have 10% of the overall market and be in 3^rd place.
3. If you make it easy and make buying music a good experience, a lot of people will buy it digitally instead of steal it digitally.
   

The CD isn't dead , Amazon and Target (#'s 4 & 5) still combine for more sales than Apple, but that's the trend. And it's way, way early days for that trend as far as video, but that's going to be the trend with that as well. Everyone who likes more flexibility and control over their media and is not change resistant will want their media in digital format to begin with. There are always those resistant to change. But you wait them out and they either change or die. The world moves on either way.

It's going to be at least 5 years before Apple rips me off and launches the "Put your TV on your iPod/iPhone" campaign, but I still believe that's what Steve's Little Hobby™ is all about.

Microsoft didn't design for this kind of stuff, not even when it set out to compete with the iPod with the Zune. The Zune does have WiFi built into it, but it's old school 802.11b. Not only that, they didn't turn on real live Internet access (you can talk to another Zune apparently, if you could find…another Zune, but you can't browse the web).

The Zune would've made sense to me as a portable media device if it had enabled WiFi. It's got a nice screen and it works fairly seamless in terms of "synching" with a media center. But I am near a half terabyte in media storage, and growing. The Zune can't hold all that or do "live tv". But the iPhone can.

There are other portable media players that are missing the boat too. I saw a very nice one from Archos, but they want you to use their software. It does have WifI, and it's got a nice screen, but a few things. One thing the good old pre iPhone iPod has taught me. I don't need a bigger screen to enjoy video remotely. The Archos is slick, but it's not going to fit into my pocket any more comfortably than a PSP (and perhaps less comfortably) and that's not all that comfortable really. But the Archos doesn't want to hook into my media center, it wants to hook right up to my cable box and use its own DVR docking station to record programs. If I were starting from scratch today with portable media, I might give it a look.

With Apple, I won't have to. Apple is making the first handheld device I can use to stream video. I know, there are handhelds that do this now. I have one. It's an iPaq and it does a nice job but the battery life wasn't very good at all with WiFi enabled.

The battery life is key to me. But if I can get an hour of WiFi access to browse or stream and still have a couple of hours of talk time, I don't think the battery life is an issue. If I stream video for an hour and won't be able to use my phone afterwards, that's a problem. For those who have continuous access to chargers that might not be a big deal. The iPhone still beats the other handhelds though because of the form factor. From the looks of it, it has a much better form factor for my pocket than even the 80GB Video iPod, and that has a way better form factor than any other portable device I have (besides the Nano, of course).

I don't see 40 million people running out and buying an iPhone for $600. But if you ask me in 5 years if I think there will be 20 million iPods/iPhones out there that do WiFi in a nice form factor, the answer is yes. That assumes some non-phone version that has similar features (the bigger touch screen, internet access via wifi, etc).

And in 10 years? In 10 years you'll be reading about how iTunes is the #3 distributor of music and video (and of course #1 in digital distribution). And by then, Apple TV isn't going to be a hobby. It'll just be some box in your house that you hook up and never think about again. It will be the box that seamlessly gets all your media wherever you want it and wherever you are. And it won't be for gearheads like me. It'll all be as easy to use as the iPod.

My Media Center runs on Microsoft Vista. The portable streaming is powered by Orb Network's software. The first handheld device to truly unleash the power of all that when I'm outside the home...is an Apple product.

Right now, I'm one of a relative handful of people who even cares. For that alone I love that Apple built this so I could take full advantage RIGHT NOW without having to wait 10 years. In ten years it will be so much better.

I'm sure there will be challengers, but like Google ten years ago, nobody knows who those challengers are. We've seen Microsoft's vision and if it's the Zune, well it's a vision, and for many people it's a very functional product.

It just doesn't liberate all my media and fit comfortably in my pocket. the iPhone looks like it will. I don't underestimate "liberating my media" and "fitting nicely and comfortably in my pocket". For now, I am sure I overestimate it, but I'm always ahead of the curve on this stuff.

Right now I think AAPL will be higher in 5 years. I could be wrong, and even if I'm right, it could go back down to $60 before shooting to $600. If your time horizon is 3 days, or 3 weeks or 3 months I don't have an opinion. But if it's 5 years, right now I would say buy APPL even with the huge run up of the last year.

all of this assumes only these three things:

1. the iPhone works pretty much as advertised
2. there will be iPods that have a lot of the functionality of the iPhone at much better prices
3. AppleTV becomes a full fledged media center/server instead of merely a media extender for iTunes
   

Things I Ponder: Would HBO Care if I Streamed Entourage to the World...

...but only on a 2" display screen? The capabilities to do this now are easy and I guess what I am thinking about is this: is there any value in HBO giving away their content on a tiny display? I can already stream from my ORB to a myspace or blog page the entire contents of my digital media library to a small display.

I do NOT recommend it as a way to watch Entourage. But, I think if I wasn't the media whore that I am and didn't have HBO already and wound up seeing Entourage on a 2" screen -- it would encourage me to BUY HBO so I could get the "full screen" version for my television.

A 2" screen is NOT the best way to watch Entourage so I don't believe there is any threat to the revenue stream from this. It doesn't hold up everywhere though -- I did the experiement with Family Guy and Family Guy is completely watchable on a 2" display and it didn't leave me thinking, "I need to see that on the big screen!"

One service I would pay $3 extra for a month from HBO is the ability to download the content I already paid for in a format that will work in my iPod. HBO can get a jump-start on Comcast and other competitors who will vie for my additional $3/here, $3 there, and one of the things I think people will wind up paying $3 here and there for is the ability to somehow broadcast what they are watching. Who gets my $3 here and there...I don't care whether it's Comcast, HBO, Tivo, Orb Networks, Apple, some company not in existence yet....

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.