What went wrong with Orby, news story

[N5XZS]

Thought you might like this news story, Here's the link...

Streaming Alone Didn’t Kill the [Almost] Satellite Star: Orby TV Chief Tells of Upstart’s Fall

Michael Thornton says new investors were poised to bail out struggling satellite company, but pulled out at last hour

www.nexttv.com

 

[FTA4PA]

Thought you might like this news story, Here's the link...

Streaming Alone Didn’t Kill the [Almost] Satellite Star: Orby TV Chief Tells of Upstart’s Fall

Michael Thornton says new investors were poised to bail out struggling satellite company, but pulled out at last hour

www.nexttv.com

Good article - thanks for posting!

 

[TheKrell]

Thought you might like this news story, Here's the link...

Streaming Alone Didn’t Kill the [Almost] Satellite Star: Orby TV Chief Tells of Upstart’s Fall

Michael Thornton says new investors were poised to bail out struggling satellite company, but pulled out at last hour

www.nexttv.com

I am getting the following error with that link:

Fastly error: unknown domain: www.nexttv.com.

Is everybody else still able to read it? Aha. I can read the story here instead: Streaming Alone Didn’t Kill the [Almost] Satellite Star: Orby TV Chief Tells of Upstart’s Fall - News Break

No, that didn't work either since it was one paragraph and then a link to nexttv.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Are you using the new iOS 15?

I can pull it up fine on Chrome but get unknown domain in Safari.

 

[TheKrell]

Are you using the new iOS 15?

Nope: all Windows and Linux ad OpenVMS here.

Juan posted a link in The Pub to a massive outage reported here: Huge parts of internet currently offline

A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch. The UK government website - gov.uk - is also down as are the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times. Affected websites displayed the message: "Error 503 Service Unavailable". Early reports suggested it could be related to Fastly, a cloud computing provider, which underpins a lot of major websites. Fastly said it was looking into problems with its global content delivery network (CDN).

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yup even Reddit is down.


Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

 

[TheKrell]

Yup even Reddit is down.

Thank God SG isn't! I am still able to get to Amazon fwiw.

 

[TheKrell]

Massive internet outage: Websites and apps around the world go dark

Countless websites and apps around the world went down for about an hour Tuesday after Fastly, a major content delivery network, reported a widespread failure.

www.cnn.com

Countless websites and apps around the world went down Tuesday after Fastly, a major content delivery network, reported a widespread failure.

Fastly supports news sites and apps like CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times and many others. It also provides content delivery for Twitch, Pinterest, HBO Max, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify and other services.

Other major internet platforms and sites including Amazon, Target, and the UK government website — Gov.uk — were affected.

For the record, I am personally having zero issues with Amazon or CNN.

 

[Redbullsnation]

I would argue that it was already on the backfoot as it had no sports. People can already get much of those channels that they offer for less through streaming so what OrbyTV really needed to survive was sports. On top of that, having an antenna to get locals isn't feasible in rural areas (where you want people to get the service) so that was another issue.

 

[NYDutch]

I would argue that it was already on the backfoot as it had no sports. People can already get much of those channels that they offer for less through streaming so what OrbyTV really needed to survive was sports. On top of that, having an antenna to get locals isn't feasible in rural areas (where you want people to get the service) so that was another issue.

According to the reports, they were already almost half way to the break even point, so the likelihood of attracting another ~30,000 subscribers to make that landmark was probably pretty good given the finances to hang in. Beyond that is where profits begin. I think projected profitability at just ~65,000 subscribers speaks well of how well they had costs and overhead under control. In hindsight, as Mr Thornton said in the piece, they should have spread their financing among more investors so the loss of one would not have been the total disaster that it was.

 

[navychop]

I will note my belief they kept prices low is because they DID NOT cover sports. Not their target market. IIRC, only about a third of US adults follow sports regularly, another third casually and the rest simply don’t care. Plenty room there to build a successful business.

 

[Skyscanner]

Lots of people totally disgusted with whiney millionaire traitors displaying their disrespect for the country that made them rich. Nah, lack of sports wasn't "the" issue at all.

 

[ty1273]

Orby is DONE!!. So get over it people. Unactivated receivers are useless, they cannot be used for any other satellite signals, hacking the firmware will accomplish nothing. Orby is not coming back so subscribe to Dish Network (former Orby subs get a discount) and watch tv that way. Maybe there should be a virtual funeral for all that are distraught over Orby’s demise. Finally go outside and give your old receivers a dignified burial.

 

[rmccolman]

I liked the Orby model. I'm one of those who has zero interest in watching sports, and it always galled me that we had to pay a bunch of $$$ a month to DirecTV for a huge pile of stuff we had no interest in. Same issue for the non-sports channels, BTW.

I'm not going to Dish, because it'll largely be more of the same situation we had with DirecTV. While Dish's plan might be marginally better in that respect, we'd still end up paying a good bit of money for channels/content that doesn't appeal to us whatsoever. At least in Orby's case, the non-premium-channel base package was so low in cost that I didn't gag when paying the monthly bill, even though there were a few channels that didn't interest us.

Sticking with FTA and OTA for now. Will probably consider a couple of streaming services at some point, but not now, as there's no broadband in our area yet. (Our internet connection is via DSL.) For that reason, Orby was a good option for us. Still sad to see it go.

But at least I've been able to re-purpose the Orby dish for FTA use.

Richard

 

[cannonz]

Says they only needed 100,000 subscribers, how many did they have at end?

 

[Tvland1]

Says they only needed 100,000 subscribers, how many did they have at end?

They had around 30,000 which they claimed was almost half way to the break even point.. needed 65,000 to break even and after that make a profit