Internet video has
gone from being an over-hyped dot-com fad to something people actually watch.
Millions of people
stream music videos, indie films and adult fare every month on their
small-screen PC _ despite the obvious drawback of stuttering, hiccuping video.
The folks at
Akimbo, a San Mateo, Calif., start-up, have been paying attention and offer a
radical proposal: Watch Internet video on your television. In May, Akimbo is
set to launch a service that uses an existing high-speed home Internet
connection to deliver 200 hours of Internet video to a television set-top box,
which will sell for $199.
The content is
downloaded in real time, so a 90-minute movie would take roughly that long to
download. The service is designed to mitigate the waiting game by asking
subscribers to specify viewing preferences so content can be downloaded
automatically overnight.
The Akimbo service
is similar to cable and satellite services in that subscribers pay more for
movies and other premium content. Prices range from $3 to $30 extra a month.
The basic service costs $9.99 a month. Akimbo will offer about 10,000 hours of
Internet video _ from CinemaNow's library of feature-length foreign films and
documentaries to Digicast's broadcasts of Brazilian soccer and other specialty
sports to sexually explicit content from Danni's Hard Drive.
The video is
stored on the Akimbo player's 80-gigabyte hard drive to provide the
best-quality video. An on-screen guide organizes the shows by category, and
showcases the five to 10 hours of new shows that arrive nightly.
Akimbo founder
Steve Shannon, whose previous start-up, iband, developed the popular
Web-authoring tool Dreamweaver, sets modest goals for Akimbo. He expects it to
initially appeal to niche audiences _ say, fans of India's Bollywood films. But
he expects Akimbo to really catch on once he gains access to mainstream
Hollywood content.
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