Orb Networks

» see orb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Place shifting asks one question of your house, and the question is how fast it can send. On TTNet ADSL in Turkey the answer was embarrassing. The line was sold on the download number and the upload sat somewhere far below it, which is fine when you are pulling pages down and useless the moment you want your own machine to serve video out to the world. Orb was built on the assumption that a home connection runs in both directions. Mine did not, and neither did most.

The company started in 2004 in Emeryville, with Joe Costello as chief executive after his years running Cadence, and Luc Julia among the founders. The product was a small Windows program. You installed it, it indexed the media on the drive, and from then on any browser anywhere could log in and play any of it. The clever part was that Orb transcoded in real time, so a video the phone could not possibly decode came down the wire already converted into something it could.

If the machine had a TV tuner card the thing got considerably better. Orb turned it into a recorder you could reach from anywhere and a live feed you could watch on a laptop in another country. This was 2005. There was no Netflix streaming, no phone with a real browser, and no such thing as putting your library in somebody else's building. Orb's answer was that you already owned a server, you just called it the computer in the corner.

Qualcomm took the technology in 2013 and never put out much of a statement about it. Orb Networks announced on 22 August that it was winding down, with the free MyCast service going immediately and the paid Orb Live app kept alive to the end of the year. The hardware, the Orb TV box and the Orb Music MP-1, had already been discontinued that May. Costello's line on the way out was that the company had made real technical progress but had always known it would need a large strategic partner to finish the job.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually did ~

The reason Orb reads as clever now is that it solved the problem from the wrong end on purpose. Everyone else was building the library in a data center and asking you to upload into it. Orb left the library exactly where it already was and made the network go get it, which meant no upload wait and no company sitting in the middle holding your files. For anyone with a large local collection this was obviously the better architecture.

It also meant Orb was hostage to two things it did not control. The machine at home had to be awake, and the line out of the house had to be wide enough to carry a video stream while somebody else in the family was using it. Both of those were fragile in ways that a data center is not, and both of them failed silently. The product did not break when your connection was too slow. It just delivered something that looked worse than it should have and gave you no explanation.

~ the fall ~

What killed the premise was storage getting cheap somewhere else. SkyDrive and Google's music locker arrived offering the same access from anywhere with none of the setup, and crucially with none of the dependence on a machine at home staying powered on. Orb's whole advantage had been that uploading your collection was impractical. Once the services started uploading it for you in the background, that advantage stopped being an advantage.

The hardware was the tell. When a software company that solved a routing problem starts shipping a $99 box, it usually means the software alone is no longer enough to explain the company. The Orb TV and the Orb Music player both landed into a market that Roku and Sonos were already finishing, and both were gone inside a couple of years.

~ what really happened ~

Nobody bought Orb Networks so much as Qualcomm bought what it knew. The technology went into the pile that became AllPlay, the company stopped answering support, and the site turned into a notice telling you where to go instead. The nine years in between produced a genuinely good piece of software that a few hundred thousand enthusiasts loved and that the rest of the internet solved differently.

The part worth keeping is the diagnosis. Orb did not lose to a better version of Orb. It lost because the constraint it was designed around, the impossibility of getting your own files up to a server, quietly stopped being true. That is the most ordinary way for infrastructure software to die, and it never gets a headline, because there is no moment where anything visibly breaks.

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