

MIT Students' SookBox Aims to Sync All of Your Media, brings Cloud into the Home - chermor
http://bostinnovation.com/2011/06/30/mit-students-bring-the-cloud-to-your-home-with-sookbox-aiming-to-sync-all-of-your-media/

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tybris
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.

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rkudeshi
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.

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localhost3000
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.

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roc
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.

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IgorPartola
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".

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

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chopsueyar
About time.

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

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rdl
I have wanted something like this for years.

I really hope these guys apply to Y Combinator!

