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New service brings digital media to you

By MAY WONG
The Associated Press

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In a move sure to raise the eyebrows of Hollywood and its partners, a California startup is unveiling a service today that allows subscribers to remotely access digital-media files — even watch live television — from any gadget with an Internet connection.

The technology from Union City, Calif.,-based Orb Networks grabs a user's music, video or photo files stored on their home PCs and streams them to Web-enabled devices such as cellphones, laptops and personal digital assistants. A user's cable or satellite TV can also be accessed as long as the video output is hooked up to a home-computer network.

"We think of this as a personal media portal," said Orb Chief Executive Jim Behrens. "Your media is always with you."

Orb contends any files on a user's PC — including copy-protected ones, such as songs downloaded from Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, or films from online service MovieLink — will be playable on-the-go through their service.

Orb's streaming technology essentially keeps the same copy protections, including the usual restrictions against making digital copies and sharing them freely over the Internet, but lets users access their media however they choose, Behrens said.

"We want content creators to get paid for their content, but once users have paid for it, they should be able to play it on whatever device they want and wherever they want," he said.

It's a notion Hollywood has challenged in the past, battling the pioneers of VCRs to the makers of digital video recorders.

Orb executives expect opposition but said they have worked closely with lawyers and are confident Orb would prevail if confronted in court.

The Orb service will be available in mid-November starting at $9.99 a month or $79.99 per year. Additional users off the same home-based account would have to pay $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year.

Users must download Orb software onto their home computers and set up a password-protected Orb account.
 
To access their home-media files over the Internet, users need to be able to launch a Web browser and have a media player — either Microsoft's Windows, RealNetworks' RealPlayer or one provided by Orb — on their portable devices.

The service is targeted at households with high-speed broadband connections, though during streaming, the quality of the videos or photos would be limited to the connection speeds and screen resolutions of the devices.