I recently got a demo of Orb.com from Mike Torres and I was quite impressed. Mike talks about the capabilities of the service in his post Orb.com & "placeshifting" where he wrote
I now have unlimited storage for videos, television,
music, and photos in my pocket for $399 less than an
iPod video.
How is that possible? www.Orb.com.
A free service designed for cell phones, PCs, Macs, and
PDAs that gives me access to my computer at home to get at all of my digital
media. All of it. I don’t have to worry about cradling or
synchronizing anything every day... and I don’t have to carry a 250GB hard drive
in my coat pocket either. Beautiful.
...
From my phone or from my laptop at work
(or anywhere else with a net connection):
I can listen to all of my WMA Lossless music on my PC at
home; over 700 albums collected over the last 15 years. I can play by genre,
playlist, album, artist, or even do a search across all my music. Of course, it
doesn’t stream at lossless quality, but for walking around downtown Seattle, the
quality is fine (128kbps – same as iTunes actually).
I can watch LIVE television – including cable – from
wherever I am. I can change the channel remotely – if I’m watching MSNBC and
want to switch over to MTV, it takes about 5-7 seconds to do so. If I like what
I’m watching, I can click the record button and catch up with the program when I
get home. This blows people away when they see it ;)
I can view (and even download) my digital photos.
Whenever someone asks about some random event we attended together, I can pull
up photos from that event within a few seconds. With over 10,000 of my digital
photos available to me from anywhere, I’ll never again say “Argh. I have that
on my computer at home.”
I can watch recorded television. Meaning I can setup my
Media Center PC to record shows to my hard drive and can click Play from
anywhere to catch up with the show. Before now, I didn’t have any time
to watch Sportscenter... now I can listen to it on the way to work.
I can turn on my webcam and watch my cats. Remember, I’m
doing this from my freakin' PHONE.
I am so amazed by this service that I considered not even blogging about
it. I didn’t think I could do it justice. I still don’t.
...
Overall this is the perfect example of combining software with online
services to enable great scenarios for everyday people. It just works
for me.
These guys have built a killer service. I'm quite surprised that
they haven't been snapped up by one of the big web companies already.