Why is Orb free and how does Orb make money?

We understand why you might be surprised: so many companies seem to be trying to get you to pay yet again when you're away from home to enjoy content you've already paid for! We have a different view here at Orb, similar to the vision behind Skype. You've already invested in your PC / Mac, your broadband connection, your content, your mobile device, your mobile data plan... now it's time to enjoy the value of all those investments. That's what Orb's all about: enabling your instant enjoyment everywhere of all your content.

But if Orb enables free access to all your content, how does Orb make its money, then? Simple: we make money by helping other people make money. Sometimes we make money when a partner (say, an access or a content provider) offers Orb under their brand to increase your use of their product. Sometimes we make money when we introduce you, through a relevant promotion, to their product (say, a concert ticket or ringtone for a band you enjoy) and you make a purchase. Because of the way Orb makes so many different aspects of the digital media ecosystem more valuable to our users than ever, there are lots of options. Speaking just for myself, using Orb made me buy more specialty channels from my cable provider than I'd ever have time to watch just at home, a tuner card from Hauppauge, a better phone with a better data plan, and an unlimited subscription from a music service because iTunes just wouldn't cut it anymore.

Privacy is a hugely important issue to us here at Orb, so there are a couple of points to be made about this. Just as all your personal media stays on your own hard drive where you installed the Orb software* - the software that streams you your content right from your own PC / Mac - so too does all information about your personal media preferences stay on your own hard drive. Just as none of your media is ever uploaded to Orb Networks' servers*, neither is any of your personal information or personal media preferences ever uploaded to Orb Networks. That's an important privacy aspect of our revolutionary user-centric infrastructure, one that puts us far, far away from the privacy issues sometimes faced by server-centric Web businesses who store everything on their, well, servers.

* None of your Content / Media is ever uploaded to Orb servers. They remain on your PC / Mac. The only exception to this rule is that when you publicly share some content on your Orb Public page (or Blog) and this content happens to become popular, then for optimal streaming experience it’s pushed in a cache on Orb Servers.