MobileRead Exclusive: Ian McCarthy's insider view of MyCasting and content everywhere

[Bob Russell]

Last week I had the pleasure of talking with Ian McCarthy, VP of Product Marketing at Orb Networks. [Well, actually now it's been a few weeks.] We discussed the upcoming release of the Orb 2.0 software and how Orb views its place in the mobile media world. It turns out that there is a lot of behind the scenes strategic thinking that we don’t usually hear about. Sure, there is a lot of information about the free service offered by Orb that gets your audio, video and photo content to you wherever you may be. But even more interesting is the inside story behind the service, and a look into the industry and Orb’s business model. We are delighted to share it with you here.

MobileRead: What can you share about how Orb 2.0 arose, and what it brings forward to the user?

Ian McCarthy: Orb has been around a little over two years, and debuted Orb v1.0 to great fanfare and overwhelming response. At CES Jan '05, the CNET Best of Show award and the amazement of people to be able to play live content on mobile devices. At that time, hardware was still not as advanced, and the whole space was prepped but there was no VCast, and MobiTV was just trying to get started. In fact, we made a classic early disruptive tech blunder... we focused on getting the core tech right and letting people latch onto whatever they wanted, specifically mobile TV, as opposed to user interface and scenarios that determine killer technology or developing a moniker of what makes it relative to your life. Access to your television content is a great part of Orb MyCasting, but what’s more powerful is the ability to build and share your own content channels.

The heart of Orb 2.0 is MyCasting – what's next after broadcasting. Not that broadcast is dead - I pay more to broadcasters now than I ever did before Orb, because now I can get content wherever I am.

MyCast turns broadcasting on its head. Broadcasting takes massive infrastructure or a more democratic infrastructure like podcasting or putting things on YouTube. But it's all about somebody providing content to a number of users. MyCasting is the other way around. It means I create my own channels from content I have available, and participating with my own devices and own network of friends. I'm at the heart of the MyCasting world. And it's enabled by a small app from Orb on my PC that turns it into my own broadcast station. 90% of the world has a PC attached to the internet world.

MR: There seem to be two views of the world. Either one views purchased content to be yours perpetually and available for shifting in place and time. Or the other view says content can be rented out, maintaining control of when, where and how the content is used. DRM enables that control, and there really is a big battle for control. How does Orb fit in?

Ian: I spent about 4 years at Sony Pictures doing online video and user created video long before there was a YouTube. I’ve been in the midst of the internals of Hollywood conversations about exactly these issues for a very long time. You've characterized exactly the where the pull of the continuum is. On one hand, it’s like going to the theater, and buying a ticket for a particular experience. Nobody thinks and expects to walk away from the theater with a video of Star Wars. On the other end of the continuum, there is this view that it's like graffiti or air. Content is just out there, and it's out there for everyone that wants it. The gap is from the view that content is about a file, an object, so questions arise about what do you want to do with this object? The first thing that comes up is replication. Napster was a nightmare for the content industry in two ways: 1) Persistent ability to browse other hard drives in the universe and 2) Being able to make copies.

That's a nightmare and beyond piracy. That's essentially saying that there's one opportunity to monetize the content that is expensive to discover, and expensive to produce in a quality way, and that takes lots of risks for these companies to market. It was a disaster, and it was right that this sort of thing got shut down.

On the other end, there are things like a sports channel where the channel is produced and you want to get it out, and advertisers want to get it out as much as possible, and immersed in people's lifestyles. When you talk about MyCasting being a superset of broadcasting, we're very serious about this being about channels. And as soon as you make the shift from, say a playlist, which is a collection of files in a certain order, to a channel all of a sudden the subtle shifts begin to speak to this answer.

Suppose you have a playlist with 10 songs that I have on my PC. You tell someone to go find out what a certain genre or artist is like that you're not familiar with. As soon as you talk about files, red flags go off on our part, on Hollywood’s part. Orb wants to be a marketer for these experiences not a pirate. Orb is emphatically about channels. So our model is that this is not about the file. And as you know as a 1.0 user, the big revolution that Orb introduced into the content ecosystem is the idea that a consumer no longer thinks about files, they think about a play button. I’ve got the web, I’ve got content I want, I’ve got a play button on the web, and then I’ve got my enjoyment experience. That’s exactly what we are.

So in this whole world of DRM, we think DRM is in place to prevent file copying, file transfers, etc. We think that there is an immense amount of innovation in the past 10 months concerning where the Hollywood industry and consumers are comfortable with, experiencing content as opposed to moving files around. YouTube is a great example, ABC putting TV shows up on the web, the iPod pay per unit on specific devices, Slingbox getting people used to the idea that they want their live TV anywhere, Tivo to Go. All these things are what we see as trends toward this goal that we, at the moment, think we are one of the leading flag bearers for. Especially MyCasting. We’re hardly the only company doing things in MyCasting, but we’re the only comprehensive web-based open solution to the idea that you should be able to get your stuff anywhere.

MR: Yet there are still other stakeholders. Like content owners and mobile operators who are not just worried about piracy but protecting revenue stream.

Ian: For example, television as opposed to music. When I watch my TV from here in New York, I’m a California resident. It’s no good to get local New York TV, because I live in California. You’re home wherever you are because of the network. Getting something to you through your browser is like getting it through the screen and speakers extending into your living room. If I can’t play it at home, then certainly I shouldn’t be able to play it anywhere else. If I can play it at home, then I am really playing it at home but to me by way of the network.

For example, if I have a cable channel, then I’m playing that cable channel effectively at home even though I might be in Italy. Or if there’s music I have downloaded to home, I don’t have to remember to plan ahead to sync it to my iPod, I just stream it to myself wherever I am. If I don’t have, for example, the license key to do that or the file format at home to stream to my Nokia phone, then I can’t do that.

Whatever works for me at home works everywhere, so it’s almost like we’ve inverted our old slogan of “Taking the home out of home entertainment” and instead said “Your home is now with you everywhere”. You can imagine the cartoon of some guy carrying around his living room with all his CDs and Tivo shows and carrying it around on his back and then switching to just grabbing a phone or a friend’s PC or an iBook. It no longer matters… it’s about the channel experience. At the heart of it all, content is about an emotional and revenue connection between the consumer and the producer. And all the stuff in between gets more efficient as technology advances. We are leading the charge to make sure that all these issues about format and access and device go away.

For example, YouTube is a huge story in the news recently. YouTube achieved this ubiquity because it used flash. I was using flash at Sony 6 years ago, but the video in flash hadn’t advanced enough. People weren’t really doing social networking yet to the same degree. YouTube was the right solution at the right time for the PC.

There’s been lots of talk about when will YouTube go mobile. And the challenge, of course, is a format one. Almost nobody has flash on their phones. Frankly, what will YouTube decide to do bit rate wise? It becomes a massive production headache.

We just launched [Wed, Oct 11] the ability for you, just like you can stream your live TV, your internet TV, your home music, your photos, I can now stream any YouTube video to myself on any device as long as I have a streaming player.

The way we do this, of course, is your home PC is what does the transcoding on the fly. Say you find the video in your home browser (Firefox or IE), and suppose it’s a promo trailer to watch the show Heroes. No time to watch right now, so you hit the “Orb This” button to grab it, and then when I have time waiting for the subway or sitting in a cab, I grab my phone. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Windows smart phone, a Nokia phone with Real Player or a phone with a 3GB player, I see the thing and hit the play button and it’s transcoded by my home PC so I can watch it. That’s a great example of how orb tears down the barriers for me getting the channels that I want and also that I am the one picking what are the channels that I stream to myself.

MR: You mentioned the channel approach, and the advancing technology. I suppose that custom channels are also going to become important as the technology can begin to support it, and that targeted ads must be a big part of your future revenue stream to support this free service.

Ian: You’re exactly right. Let me give you another example of that. I watch a lot of X-Files reruns and these come on in the middle of the night. So I use my own hard drive as if it’s a Tivo. I go on the web, I see that something’s on or someone says there’s something I should be watching. Let’s say Heroes, for example. I find it in my TV Guide and I hit record to use my hard drive space (which is so cheap these days) as part of my TV experience.

As you know, the AMD Live guys included us in the initial launch of AMD Live because for them this is an outstanding reason to think about your PC and your PC’s processor as part of your entertainment life. It’s no longer a utility, it’s part and parcel of the fun that I have in my life.

So, let’s say I’m watching an X-Files rerun. Because of broadcast it’s on in the middle of the night. So broadcast dictates that maybe you put on some ads that are targeted towards sci-fi fans, but it’s TNT and a lot of these things run for octogenarians that are up in the middle of the night watching. That is useless with respect to the advertiser trying to reach me.

On the contrary, imagine the test we did with TicketMaster almost a year ago, where your home PC knows what you stream. (But not Orb networks – so it’s the opposite of a Google server side business. None of that info is ever uploaded about you.) Your PC then, when it polls the web server on Orb Networks to see if you have any commands or anything else for me, e.g. is he logging in from a Nokia N80, and if so what’s his bit rate right now, and is it Real Player that he needs, and what is it that he wants to see? Then it transcodes that. Similarly, your home PC at home might say that you’ve been streaming a lot of such and such artist or TV show recently. Then it may check and find that Vodafone has a bunch of wallpapers and ring tones for you, and that can go up into the interface. Then it’s a contextual interface that makes even Google’s AdSense look like a great 1.0 version of contextual ads.

The reason for that is that it’s about you, not broadcast. Google is now an outstanding collaborative filtered broadcast ad solution. Our ad solution when we roll it out after we cross the magic million mark of users, will be the most targeted advertising ever, and because of the way the technology works, it doesn’t have all the scary privacy weirdness of a server side solution where that company knows everything about you. We don’t want to know anything about you. What we want to do is broker between you and what you want, and when people make money then so do we.

I’ll give you another example. Suppose the Smashing Pumpkins get back together and do some concerts. How fabulous would it be to be able to record and send a message on a video clip to fans that says from TicketMaster and Smashing Pumpkins “Hey diehard fans. I’m looking forward to seeing you at ...”? That clip is available to you because the app knows you frequently stream from Smashing Pumpkins. Instead of something invasive and weird, it feels more like a search engine ad. Advertisements can become part of the content experience, and be as good as the regular content, without becoming advertorial. And Orb is allowing that to be done in a more targeted way than has ever been possible, because of the technology.

MR: There seem to be a lot of partnerships, even such as Intel and AMD, which you have mentioned. Is there any more to it than shared awareness?

Ian: PC, mobile content, mobile processor - partnerships run the whole gambit. AMD is promoting awareness. Hauppauge bundles Orb with some of their computer tuners. Nokia announced a bundling with their N80 phone, with a bookmark already installed to make it easier to get to Orb. Vodafone promoted Orb in Germany since before the World Cup. In next month or so, they will offer a quality service patch to customers for a monthly fee to lock in a minimum bandwidth experience. That’s a brilliant way of taking advantage of what they can do for their users, charging a nominal fee for that, and we share in that revenue.

In addition to Vodafone, there are two more carriers that we’ll be going live with in the next weeks. WinAmp has seen explosive growth outside the U.S., and they have decided they can expand the vision of WinAmp as a gateway to lots of media experiences, not just as a player. They led the charge with things like Shoutcasting which is an ancestor of MyCasting. They have integrated Orb into WinAmp Remote, to discover home music and play it in the player without going back and forth with the browser.

MR: Have you approached Palm about integrating or bundling with Orb?

Ian: In fact, ironically, it was the other way around. Palm came to us almost a year ago and said, hey, as the 700p and the 700w come out, we’re thinking about putting together an app that will bridge between the discovery experience that’s in a web browser and the play experience that’s in a player. But it turned out that Palm didn’t actually build that player with us. Priority shifted for them and also for us, we had lots of exciting things going on. We know the Kinoma Player guys really well. We dropped a press release together back at NAB in April about how once the Kinoma player for PalmOS is out there (not just the one that ships with the 700p through Sprint, but the one that they’re any day now going to be putting out for Treo 650 users) then all 3.5 million users of the Treo 650 can now MyCast any of their content from home live TV, You Tube videos, right to their Palm device.

So you can see how wherever the ecosystem is about content that I want to access, and the technology that enables the access from processors on the PC itself, to the PC manufacturers themselves, to the bandwidth providers like DSL or cable, wireless providers whether wi-fi or carrier, handset, etc. - all these guys are now able to tell their story with a more visceral emotional payoff because of the fact that MyCasting is enabled by this free app called Orb. The whole market is finally moving in this direction with a lot of momentum.

MR: Mark Cuban talks about how internet is not the best approach to broadcasting due to scalability. Big events can also hit bandwidth limitations from the carriers. Is that a problem you foresee with Orb?

Ian: Skype is not about their infrastructure, but what you already have. Nothing is streamed from Orb servers, so they only have to support login and speed check. But where Skype is demolishing the revenue of the telecom industry, Orb is enhancing the revenue of the broadcast industry.

We used to be asked a year and a half ago, “On the one hand you seem like the most killer 3G application ever, but on the other hand you seem like the most killing 3G application ever. What do you have to say to that?” What we always would tell them is what the carriers themselves told us… “Bring it on.” The carriers perspective outside the U.S. is that they have the infrastructure, and have already gone down the road of trying to provide users enough content to own the content experience. But you can’t offer any one user enough to satisfy everything they need. Vodafone stepped up to say they are not abandoning their own content library, but will extend that so you have both options.

This will certainly impact people that have a closed view of the world. We think that at the moment, Apple is in many ways the most interesting contrasting paradigm. They sell you the hardware and the content, make it about a file, and get you to stay in their world.

MR: What web technology is Orb using for the 2.0 browser interface?

Ian: The Web 2.0 interface that puts the app inside the browser to simply create playlists, define favorites, etc. and is Ajax based. We have been watching the technology because anything browser based is very interesting to Orb.

When you go to Orb 2.0, there is a home page for quick access (like presets on car radio to quickly to to a channel).

Orb 1.0 had a slightly odd interface. The PC interface looked more like a mobile interface. Then the WAP interface was sort of like a subset. For Orb 2.0, we wanted to look at quick access and quick drag and drop power to make things simple, but to allow advanced activities to be available in a straightforward manner also. The PC interface is ready for launch, but the mobile interface is not at the final version yet, but will evolve and release in the next months coming up.

Orb 1.0 got the guts right. Orb 2.0 fine tuned the engine, making it 40% faster, reducing the size down to 10meg, having one process running instead of 12, providing some tweaks to help with those anti-virus users who were running into problems, etc.

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I also asked Ian how he will get this into the hands of users and make people aware of Orb? Basically, he said that they are going to use a combination of partnerships (for those who have a predisposed mindset and who are using WinAmp, or a tech user with a smartphone, or already looking for video on a PC) and ways to encourage direct word of mouth through use of the product (helping to create a buzz with things like links to content that can be sent to your friends in an email). Orb is expecting that people will brag about using it.

And he also pointed out that the cost structure is unbelievably low. What he called “the perfect internet story.” The infrastructure is already there and monetized, and they are all set to reap the rewards of that.

In closing, I used a mechanism that Orb Chairman and co-founder, Joe Costello, is famous for -- I asked Ian what he’d like to see a future press release say about Orb. He said that he’d like to have it be said of Orb in the future that Orb took technology that was a bit early when it started, but the market caught up to the capabilities, and they pulled together the message, the user experience (including the interface, how you tell your friends about it, support, etc) and that Orb is what moved that inflection point to where it’s part of everyone’s life.

I want to thank Ian McCarthy for sharing his thoughts about Orb and broadcasting and the media anywhere technology boom, and I’m sure we will continue to hear a lot more from Orb Networks in the future. In the meantime, whether you jump in with Orb 1.0 or move ahead to Orb 2.0, be sure to take a look at what they have to offer.

Important Note: Due to the difficulties in doing an accurate transcription, and my own time limitations over the last couple of weeks, this information is what you might call a "near transcription". It includes a cleaned up version of the most interesting content excerpted from our conversation. Originally, I was simply transcribing as the informational basis for a standard story, but to be honest, the information and thoughts that Ian provided were just so too good to not share them in more detail. I believe, therefore, that this is a reasonable compromise that allows us to present some very unique information, and a glimpse of Ian’s perspective on some really interesting topics. Ian has reviewed a copy of the article himself, and I believe it very accurately describes our conversation, but if there are any errors that made it into this article, they are entirely my responsibility.

Ian McCarthy is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Orb Networks. According to the Orb Networks corporate leadership profile, “Ian has pioneered products in the online media space for early-stage startups and for public companies like AOL and Sony Pictures Digital. At Sony, he ran Product Development for a business unit focused on providing media-editing software, online services, and Hollywood content to a wide range of Sony devices. Prior to joining Orb, he was CEO of GoPix, Inc., which provides integrated client/server solutions for mobile imaging.”