Switched On: Akimbo’s long tail adds big dogs

By Ross Rubin | March 9, 2007

Filed under: Features, Home Entertainment

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Capped by Google’s $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, 2006 was certainly the year that broadband video captured the Internet’s imagination. Yet Internet-delivered video faces several challenges, among them how to route that pipe to the television where video has traditionally been consumed. One early marketplace answer came from Akimbo. The company’s service and set-top box drew mixed reviews at its debut, with many finding value in he diversity of its content but disappointment in the uneven quality of the video and the set-top’s performance.

Akimbo came back for a second stab late last year with a new set-top, an RCA-branded IPTV receiver developed by Thomson’s professional telecommunications division (which also brands the MSN TV set-top box. The good news is that the new set-top overcomes the glitches of the first-generation box and supports component video. However, Akimbo remains a standard-definition (at best) TV service. Setup is simple and straightforward; Akimbo offers an 802.11g adapter that plugs into one of the box’s USB ports. And since everything on the service is downloaded, real-time throughput isn’t much of an issue.

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