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State of the Art

Web to TV: New Gadget With Glitches

How’s this for a miracle scenario?

After dinner tonight, you flop on the couch for a little TV. But you don’t actually care what’s on right now. Instead, you pull out your phone. You scroll through a list of every TV show broadcast in the last month. You tap the one you want, put the phone back in your pocket, and happily swing your feet up onto the coffee table as the show plays on your TV.

Suddenly, the Internet is your personal TiVo — the world’s biggest. Every show available anywhere on the Web is listed on your phone, ready for transmitting to your TV with one tap. And, it’s all free.

This, believe it or not, is the promise of the Orb TV ($100), a tiny plastic hockey puck that connects to your television. You don’t really have to understand how it works, but in essence, it uses your computer (to which it connects over your wireless network) to fetch Web TV shows — and then it blasts them to your TV.

What a concept! No longer must you pay for TV shows by the episode, as you must on the Apple TV box. No longer are you blocked from Hulu and the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox), as you are with Google TV and Boxee. In the never-ending quest to bring Web television shows to your big-screen set, the Orb TV would seem to be the best approach yet.

Any show from any Web source, listed on my phone, ready to play on my TV? I didn’t just want to love the Orb TV. I wanted to sweep it off its feet and marry it.

Unfortunately, the Orb’s concept is a lot better than its execution.

First, you open the box and discover — no manual. There’s a wiring diagram, but that’s it. Not a word of instruction.

Mind-blowing, isn’t it? I mean, this isn’t a flashlight. This isn’t a tambourine. This is a complex device that requires installing one program on your Mac or PC, downloading another on your iPhone or Android phone, introducing the Orb to your Wi-Fi network, connecting it to your TV, switching its U.S.B. cable from your computer to the power plug, signing up for an account — it’s no piece of cake. And the company simply leaves you to flounder.

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Credit...Stuart Goldenberg

It doesn’t take an M.B.A. to realize that omitting instructions is a poor business move. You may save 11 cents a box, but you’ll pay for it 20 times over in tech support calls.

Or maybe not: Orb Networks, which makes the device, doesn’t even accept tech support calls. You can e-mail, or you can conduct a live chat with a help agent (if you can catch one in the four hours a day they’re available — 6 to 10 p.m. Eastern). The company may as well tattoo “So Long, Suckas” on its forehead.

Anyway. If you’re resourceful, you may eventually find the manual at orb.com. There, you find the full 22 pages of setup (29 steps).

When it’s all over, you’re ready to dive in. The phone app lets you browse the list of available shows by genre or by Most Popular, search by show name or scroll through one big master list. It’s crazy great: you don’t know or care which TV network produced the shows or which Web site they’re coming from. All that matters is what you want to watch right now.

When you tap a show’s name on your phone, you’re offered a Play Now button. (Why is that confirmation step necessary, by the way? What else would tapping a show’s name mean?) Then, after about 10 seconds, it begins to play on your TV.

Here, the two Orb disappointments begin. First, the video quality is pretty terrible. It’s soft, low in detail and resolution, and it plays small on your TV screen (or at least mine), with a big black margin. (Weirdly, there isn’t even an H.D.M.I. connection from the Orb to your TV — only component and composite cables.) The company says it’s working on hi-def. But for now, you get substandard definition.

Second, the list of shows is a big tease. When you tap “Family Guy,” for example, you see a list of all nine seasons. Tapping anything but the latest season, though, produces an error message: “We’re sorry, that season is not currently available.” Over and over again. Every show is like that.

Now, the fact that older shows aren’t available isn’t really Orb’s fault; it can show you only what’s actually up on Hulu or the TV networks’ sites (plus ESPN3, Comedy Central, YouTube, Dailymotion and Netflix Watch Instantly). But if they were really sorry, they’d simply hide the shows that we can’t actually watch, instead of getting our hopes up and wasting our time. (The company agrees. It says a software update will fix this later this month.)

Sometimes shows froze permanently. Some crash the box, requiring it to restart. Some are jerky, some are mislabeled and some won’t play at all.

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Orb TV uses a wireless connection to gather Web TV shows from your computer so you can watch them on your TV.

Some “60 Minutes” episodes don’t play at all; instead, a message appears that says, “Still want more great CBS News Video? Click Resume!” Umm, using what mouse? It’s a TV. How are you supposed to click Resume? (“We have some glitches with certain shows,” the company concedes. “We’ll be fixing those in the coming weeks.”)

You can also use your phone to play stuff that’s on your Mac or PC, in iTunes or in folders that you specify. Those play perfectly — except, of course, copy-protected stuff. That’s right, shows and movies you bought from iTunes — precisely the files you’d most want to watch on your TV — don’t play. You can also play music and photos from your computer on your TV, which works fine.

So Orb TV isn’t what you’d call a refined product. Like most bring-Web-video-to-your-TV boxes, it’s glitchy and inconsistent.

That said, it’s a valiant effort. Its ability to show you all those fantastic Hulu shows on your TV is ingenious.

See, Hulu, the company, wants you to pay $8 a month to watch its free Web shows on your TV. That’s why most set-top boxes and phones can’t play Hulu — the company blocks free playback on anything but computers. Orb’s sneaky workaround is to use your computer as a go-between. (Sometimes, as a show begins, you actually see Hulu’s Play button “clicked” by Orb’s invisible software robot.)

But that’s the big problem with the Orb and all similar Web-to-TV products: they’re essentially hacks. They’re workarounds. They’re meant to outsmart the TV networks and Hulu, which don’t want you watching Web shows on your TV.

The reason they don’t, of course, has to do with ads; in the old model, advertisers pay to have their ads shown at a certain time of day, in certain geographical areas, and so on. The networks and Hulu show different, shorter, punchier ads when you’re watching the shows online. Showing them on your TV would violate their advertiser agreements.

The solution to the problem, though, is not blocking Web shows from your TV. First, as the Orb shows, there are workarounds to that blockade. Second, what is a TV anymore? TV sets are becoming computers, computers are becoming TV’s, the line is blurring, and the blocking of gadgets is looking more and more arbitrary.

No, the solution is to sit the TV executives and advertisers down and find a way to make Web shows pay for themselves, no matter what device they’re playing on. That would make infinitely more sense. It would mean that gadgets like the Orb could be more refined and a lot less hacky. We could watch TV anywhere, the networks could make more money and everybody would win.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Web to TV: New Gadget With Glitches. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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