This is what I had to say about Orb on Jan 10th:

Ok, I must not be getting something here. Why in my life time would I ever pay a monthly service fee to access my own video, photos etc from my own computer??? Just maybe I'd pay for software to do this which is likely available from a number of vendors.

Am I missing something here??? Someone, please buy me a clue.

Apparently this was in CNet's CES 2005 Top 10 next big thing awards.

Wow, look at the exciting press release. Is anyone really interested in this? If so, let me know. I can probably duplicate the software and company in about a week and my stuff wouldn't require Windows Media Center PC either. It would likely work with any version of Windows, Linux or MAC OSX.

Well, they must have signed up about 0 subscribers to their paid service because they just announced that it will now be FREE to all consumers. Here is the press release.

Here is a snippet of marketing speak from that press release:

“By eliminating subscription fees, Orb eliminates the final barrier between consumers and their digital media,” said Jim Behrens, CEO, Orb Networks. “The allure of ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to one’s digital world has proven to be exceptionally compelling to Orb subscribers thus far. In our view, a free Orb service will exponentially increase our value proposition for those customers -- and millions of new customers as well.”

Imagine, after all these years I never realized there was a barrier between myself and my own digital media. At the very least they may have more than 0 customers now that they have exponentially increased their value proposition. My guess is they are maybe in the double digits now.