MIT Students' SookBox Aims to Sync All of Your Media, brings Cloud into the Home | Hacker News Reader

MIT Students' SookBox Aims to Sync All of Your Media, brings Cloud into the Home

bostinnovation.com

28 pointschermor9 comments

Reminds me of Orb, now called Orb Caster - http://www.orb.com. It was pretty awesome to play with and a good combination with a WinTV PVR card, but I never found myself in a situation where I would actually use it. I never really needed most of my media outside of the home. Admittedly, that was before 3G and smartphones became commonplace, but I doubt it would have changed much. At least not for me.

Agreed. I set up Orb about 5-6 years ago to stream my music and videos, but it was always too much hassle to make sure I left my desktop on (and that it didn't go into sleep mode).

For music, it was more trouble than it was worth - I always had enough to last me on my MP3 player.

For videos, Orb didn't work well on my internet connection (I think 5mbps at the time). Also, I never had a good enough reason to actually stream a personal video, other than to show off the Orb service to someone.

Especially now, with the proliferation of Pandora and Hulu and Netflix and YouTube and other always-on media services, is there really a need for this type of product? I say no.

Seems like the world is trending away from people owning this kind of hardware. As a consumer I want to be as hands off as possible. Not sure I want to deal with the overhead of putting a server in my house.

>Not sure I want to deal with the overhead of putting a server in my house.

Interesting username then...

But I think that if it is an appliance rather than a server -- this thing is great.

I'd like to not host this stuff myself as well, but in the meantime I've got a Synology device doing a damn good job for very little time investment and not much money. I don't have to stream my media from the internet, I don't have to leave my PC on, it doesn't draw as much power and it has some reasonable redundancy features.

Now my phone, laptop, boxee, etc can all sync from that central store and pull data from it on the fly, at 802.11n or gigE speeds. So I'm not burning battery life waiting on Comcast and burning through my wired and wireless data caps.

As long as consumer internet is slow and battery life limited, and particularly as data caps become increasingly common, there's going to be a market opportunity for a local media store that can be used to sync your various devices.

I would definitely be interested in something like this. Most apps sync with either some proprietary cloud or at best Dropbox. Universal as Dropbox is, I just don't trust it.

An even better solution would be to sync all my devices over ssh. In that sense, I already have a private "cloud".

So it's just Boxee plus streaming? I can see media companies loving the piracy capabilities behind this one...

About time.

You could build your own, but not sure if your home ISP likes you hosting servers.

I have wanted something like this for years.

I really hope these guys apply to Y Combinator!

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