Orb TV: Internet TV + Time-Shifting

• October 22nd, 2006 | IPTV, Streaming Video, Mobile TV, Time Shifting

I originally tried Orb as a way to watch cable shows on my Internet-enabled PDA, only to realize that they didn’t support my device. A few days passed, and I was searching for a way to remotely control my external TV tuner card, a Hauppage WinTV-PVR USB2 box, over the Internet, as well as watch IPTV. Visiting the Hauppage site to see what they recommended, I found that they were actually partnered with Orb.

So I gave Orb a try again, this time from my laptop, and I had a lot more success. I did have to monkey around a bit before I figured out how it worked on the remote end. It’s actually rather simple, once you know what to expect.

Before I talk about that, let me just tell you how Orb is setup. First, you download and install Orb on your desktop computer. Create a free account, and then you can configure it to recognize your TV tuner card. You can now watch live TV, record and view programs later (time-shifting), watch other video, view photos, or listen to audio files - pretty much any media that is on your computer.

You can also remotely set a channel to record at a specific time or even turn on your webcam and watch what’s going on in the vicinity of your computer. Of course, as with any program similar to Orb, you’ll have to leave your home computer running, and connected to the Internet. But if you forget that, you can still watch over 40 Internet TV (IPTV) channels (mostly US) or listen to Internet radio.

Firstly, Orb doesn’t seem to work as consistently in the Firefox web browser. It does work quite well in IE 6.x. (That’s all I tried.) You can resize the viewing window (i.e., browser window), or click on it to get full screen viewing.

What you should know is that it takes some time before you’ll see anything. I haven’t looked into, but I suspect that what happens, at least for live TV, is that the Orb desktop application records a chunk of time, transmits to the Orb servers, which in turn sends it to your remote browser window. That means you often have to wait for display to start. And sometimes the display will “sputter”: disappear, stutter, then come back.

It should be noted that my setup at home is wireless, and the laptop I was testing on was also wirelessly connected. So this may have some small effect on my response time. I will be getting one friend to test from half-way across the country, and another from part-way across the world. More details soon.

Orb 2.0 is out now, but does not have all of the features of V1 working as of this writing. The best part: both versions are still free. An alternative to Orb, at least for mobile TV service, is FreeBe from Rok Entertainment.