Orb TV: the latest device bringing web to TV
Add Orb TV to the list of devices that is attempting to bring the web to the TV. The Oakland, Calif.-based company launched the product on Thursday — a hockey puck shaped object (pictured on the left) that promises to deliver all sorts of content available on the Internet straight to your TV.
Orb TV is selling for $99 (purchased only through its website) and can help you find any show regardless of the source including content from Hulu, YouTube and CBS or from your computer like photos, according to Orb TV. Users control the device through a smartphone app and can search simply by typing in a show like “Glee.”
“Our belief is that the evolution of digital media has been stymied,” said Orb TV CEO Joe Costello. “The whole premise it that it should be enjoyed anywhere, anytime and to make it simple. The last part hasn’t happened.”
Sound familiar? Of course it does because Orb TV is going up against several other device makers, including Roku, Boxee, Apple TV and Google TV, in a race to dominate the living room in much the same way.
Costello said that Orb has a couple of advantages over the competitors in that the device lets people view anything you can get for free on the Internet on the TV. “We can’t be shut down,” Costello said. Several broadcasters, including CBS, ABC, NBC and Hulu have blocked their content from appearing on Google TV for example. (Check out NYT tech columnist David Pogue’s devastating review of Google TV here.)
Currently Orb TV does not have any content partners since anything that is available on the user’s computer can be viewed on a TV, including Netflix if the user is a subscriber. ”We do talk to content guys like Netflix and Amazon,” said Costello. “But we don’t have to.”
(Photo: Orb TV)
Western Digital enters crowded digital living room with new device
This holiday season, technology companies are singing a familiar refrain: “Everybody gather around the TV.” With Apple Inc and Google Inc already rolling out their devices to plug into the home television, the connected living room just got more crowded, as hard drive maker Western Digital Corp has updated its television media player just in time to compete with the likes of Apple TV and Google TV for the almighty holiday shopping dollar.
Western Digital’s latest offering, the WD TV Live Hub at a price point of $199, is an update to the Lake Forest, California-based company’s last media player. A key difference is this one comes with a 1 terabyte hard drive built-in, while the previous version had to be connected to an external hard drive for stored movies, music and photos. Western Digital also upgraded the interface on the device and gave it a wireless keyboard made it compatible with wireless keyboards, which users can wield from the couch. Like the previous version of WD TV, this device has Internet connectivity. It can stream movies from Netflix, download films from Blockbuster, access a user’s Facebook page and more.
While Apple TV is priced lower at $99, that device is mostly geared toward streaming rented TV shows and movies over the Web, whereas Western Digital is taking a bet that users will want to download movies and TV shows, not just stream them. Hence that 1 terabyte of storage.
“While the whole industry is zagging toward streaming, we still think the hard drive has a place,” said Dale Pistilli, vice president of marketing for Western Digital, at an event at a studio loft in Hollywood, California, to unveil the device on Tuesday night.
On another front, while Google TV is geared toward making almost the entire Web search-able and playable on a user’s TV, WD TV Live Hub does not go that far — even though it does come with a keyboard. That search function makes U.S. broadcasters nervous out of a fear that users will migrate toward Web content and away from the shows that make up the meat and potatoes of the usual cable TV diet. Three of the biggest broadcasters have blocked their shows from Google TV. Western Digital is not seeking to rattle the cages of Hollywood with its WD TV Live Hub, and with its ability to store large amounts of downloaded movies (up to 120 hours of high definition video and 1,500 hours of video in standard definition) that users would pay for, the device is arguably more friendly to Hollywood than Google TV.
From a price perspective, WD TV Live Hub is cheaper than Google TV. Sony Corp this month unveiled a line of Google-enhanced sets that cost between $600 and $1,400. Sony also unveiled a Google-enabled set-top box that costs $400.
Wired magazine took a lukewarm view of Western Digital’s last offering, the WD TV Live Plus, faulting it in a review for having a “chunky remote that recalls the sophistication of your finer motel television set clicker” and adding that “video quality was hit-and-miss” for movies streamed over the Web.
Is Apple preparing a counter-attack to Google’s TV move?
Apple is keen on describing its Apple TV business as a “hobby.”
But one week after Google barged into the living room with its high-profile Google TV announcement, Apple suddenly looks like it’s taking its hobby a lot more seriously.
According to technology blog engadget, which cites an anonymous source “very close to Apple,” the Cupertino, California company has a new version of its Apple TV in the works that completely overhauls the original product.
The price of the Apple TV will drop from $229 to $99 (read: priced to move), and the device will be based on the iPhone operating system and pack Apple’s home-grown A4 processor under the hood.
Also of note, the new Apple TV will offer a modest 16GB of on-board flash memory for storage (the current model offers a hard drive with ten times the capacity) – that suggests that Apple is recasting the product as a cloud-based service, in which entertainment and content comes primarily from the Internet.
That would be more along the lines of Google TV, which is based on Google’s Android software and allows TV viewers to quickly pull up videos, photos, music and other content from the Web through an on-screen searchbox. Google also hopes to get software developers to create brand new applications specially designed for the new generation of Internet-connected TVs.
Endgadget says there is no word on whether the new Apple TV will be compatible with the massive library of apps that already exists for the iPhone smartphone. But it’s a smart bet that part of the reason Apple is moving to the iPhone OS is for precisely that reason.
This is nothing new. I got a program from seetvpc [dot] com, then connected my laptop to my TV with a S-cable. I don’t have Cable TV because of this.
Google just knows how to spin their “revolutionary” ideas. Amazing how the mainstream media reacts to any Google
announcement. It’s Wizardry and Snake Oil. Nothing new and revolutionary.
Apple’s tablet: No time for a flop
With Wednesday’s expected unveiling of the Apple tablet, the tech world is bracing for a device that could revolutionize everything from mobile computing to the newspaper industry. But what if the tablet doesn’t live up to expectations?
While Apple is known for its golden touch, the company has had its share of flops. The five products below represent some of Apple’s biggest disappointments; but they also provide important lessons that can be found in its smash hits.
Newton: First released in 1993, the Newton represented one of the first attempts at a mass-market, touchscreen-based handheld computer. But the brick-sized Message Pad family of devices that ran the Newton operating system were too big and, at $700-plus, too pricey. And the mixed results of the initial version of the handwriting recognition made Newtons an easy target for criticism.
While some cite the Newton as a progenitor to the iPhone and the expected tablet, it’s notable that the Newton was developed while Apple CEO Steve Jobs was in exile. Within two years of Jobs’ return in 1996, the Newton was cast overboard.
Lisa: Before there were Macs or Windows PCs, there was Apple’s Lisa, one of the first commercially available PCs to feature a graphical user interface. Introduced in 1983, the PC featured a 5Mhz Motorola 68000 CPU, 1MB of RAM and two 5.25 inch floppy drives. At $10,000, the Lisa was expensive even for business customers (Wikipedia cites NASA as one of the biggest customers) and its performance was deemed somewhat sluggish, according to some accounts. The release of the less expensive Macintosh PCs in 1994 1984 made it hard to justify purchasing a Lisa, and Apple killed the product in 1986.
Pippin: Unlike the Newton and the Lisa, the Pippin was a relatively small-scale flop – mostly because it never really got off the ground. The console was based on Mac hardware but was designed to connect to a TV for playing video games and surfing the Web. Apple designed the Pippin – named after a relative of the McIntosh apple – to be marketed by other companies. But Japan’s Bandai was the only major company to jump on the bandwagon, releasing a U.S. product in 1996. According to some Apple-focused websites, Bandai sold a meagre 42,000 units before discontinued the product in 1998.
Rokr: Marrying cellphones and music is a no-brainer today, but Apple’s first stab at the combination hit a flat note. Two years before iPhone’s 2007 introduction, the Motorola Rokr was released, representing the first cell phone to boast direct integration of Apple’s iTunes music capabilities. But the handset was more of a jazzed-up candybar-style phone than a full-featured smartphone and the device could only hold 100 songs.
Every useful feature of Windows was found in Macintosh first. Everything from windows themselves to fonts to mouse control and on and on. Hopefully Mac produces a great product so Microsoft will have some new growth line and features to copy.
Blockbuster throws its hat into the set-top box ring
Blockbuster got into the set-top box game right in time for the holiday season with a new digital media player that brings fewer but newer titles from the Web to TV six months after arch rival Netflix launched its $99 Roku set-top box. Netflix followed that launch with similar partnerships with Tivo, Samsung, LG Electronics and Microsoft.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. While the number of people who watch movies or TV via the Web is still small, media and technology executives believe a host of new technologies will make Web to TV a mainstream staple. Vudu already sells a $299 set-top box that lets users download TV shows, while Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PS3 game consoles can also be used to download programming from the Web for TV viewing.
Apple of course is trying to take a bite of the market with its Apple TV device that lets viewers download shows from their computers onto their TVs.
This could save consumers a lot of money– bypassing the need to pay hefty cable fees — and a lot of time when you factor in all the hours spent watching commercials. These devices do require fast Web connections, but market researcher Gartner forecasts there will be 499 milion residential broadband subscribers globally by 2012, up from 323 million at the end of 2007.
Blockbuster said its MediaPoint set-top box, made by broadband device maker 2Wire, allows customers to download high-definition quality movies to their TVs via broadband lines for $1.99 apiece, after an initial $99 for the box and 25 films.
Consumers have 30 days to watch a film once it is downloaded to the set-top box, and must finish watching it within 24 hours of pushing the “play” button. The service, called Blockbuster OnDemand, can be ordered at http://www.blockbuster.com beginning on Tuesday.
Unlike Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature, which streams movies to subscribers’ TVs or personal computers, the Blockbuster on-demand service will be open to customers who do not subscribe to its DVD-by-mail service, Blockbuster Online. Blockbuster Chairman and Chief Executive Jim Keyes said the company’s longtime emphasis on new releases draws different consumers than Netflix subscribers, who are directed by its Web site to older catalog titles.
Boy I bet there is a lot of pent-up demand for yet-another-movie-download box. The quality and quantity of TV programming on the Web has improved substantially but viewing that content on your big-screen TV is still an unmet need.
Orb looks like a brilliant solution. From what I read here, all it does it connect your computer to your TV screen. You can then use a service like TVDevo.com to get TV online and “beam it” to your big screen. Not sure about Netflix, but as long as you have an internet connection, you can watch TV through these 2 companion services.