You may have heard of Akimbo by now. The San Mateo, Calif., startup has been quietly making programming alliances over the past year and fine-tuning its Internet television service.
I hadn’t planned on getting an Akimbo box to add to my TiVo and DVD recorder setup, chiefly because I didn’t want to have to call the Comcast service guy out here to bring my high-speed Internet connection to the family room.
What I didn’t realize is that Akimbo also supports high-speed wireless connections. Yesterday I took out the Akimbo unit, installed the drivers onto my PC, installed the settings onto the Linksys wireless adapter, logged on to my.akimbo.com to set up my service, and programmed the unit.
The entire process took about 45 minutes, which surprised and impressed me. (The TiVo setup sometimes takes a couple of hours. The Roku music player, another nice piece of tech/consumer electronics elegance, took me an hour to assemble.) The speed of the downloads via my Apple Extreme wifi setup was also impressive.
I was also unaware that Akimbo has six videobloggers in its lineup: Steve Garfield, Clint Sharp and several others, in addition to Cartoon Network, other big media programs, and its real strength: niche video from hundreds of video creators. A lot of the sweet, simple UI tricks reminiscent of the TiVo are here as well.
After two days of watching, I’m already a big Akimbo fan. (Disclosure: we’re discussing an Ourmedia channel with Akimbo.) I’ve already subscribed to new videos published by Steve and Clint, and I’ve downloaded tutorials on public speaking (no snide comments) and a look at the 10 most popular dog breeds in Australia (we hope to get a puppy next month).
Looking forward to seeing where Akimbo helps steer the Internet television revolution.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Wow… thanks for the great comments JD. I’ve become a big fan of your book Darknet, but people will get suspicious of this mutual admiration society we’re starting here! ;)
Only part that puzzles me in your description of setting up Akimbo is the part about installing the drivers on your PC. We don’t have any drivers for the PC, so I suspect you’re referring to something to do with your wireless router or something. Akimbo doesn’t need any drivers and typically needs no configuration or settings changes.
But, glad you’re liking it. Stay tuned for some big news on content deals coming to Akimbo soon.
Post more feedback as you use the system… we look forward to hearing more from you.
–josh goldman
Akimbo Systems, Inc.
That’s what I get for doing this from memory. You’re right, no drivers. Fixed now. I forgot to mention, the unit is beautiful.
Talk about being locked in…..
Dave Winer complains about being locked in to a service all the time…..my thing is that a DVR should be the same as a VCR. You buy the hardware and record your content…..why should we have to pay subscription fees to tivo, akimbo or direct tv?
I have a direct tv dvr collecting dust because it doesn’t work with cable….Being locked in is not good.
Well, you’re not locked in. You’re free — today — to set up a home network and watch anything in the world that comes over the Web right in your living room.
Services like Akimbo and TiVo add value by organizing all that flotsam and jetsam into channels, providing tools to skim and archive those shows, providing reliability by storing the shows on their own servers, and, yes, in some cases asking people to fork over some dough (generally 49 cents to 4 bucks) to the content creators.
Don’t want to subscribe? That’s your choice. But there’s a reason many of us sign up for these services.
I positive you need to pay for TIVO service to use their box…as in my case with direct tv and I checked akimbo’s web site and I am pretty sure you have to pay their fee to get it to work as a web DVR.
Adding value? I can program my VCR to record programs that I want. Technology has made this process easier and it should, so in 20 years your telling me we have to pay 9.99 or 12.99 a month to get the same functionality a VCR has?
Maybe a Media Center version of XP is the right choice for those who don’t want to lock in to tivo. Too bad I use Apple….
I’m a big fan myself. I get all my Adult Swim content among other things on the Akimbo. It’s a great device. I hope that someday I’ll be able to get all my content through there.