Akimbo breaks ground with Internet TV service

Akimbo, a set-top box and service for receiving television shows through the Internet, could be the most important new consumer technology product of 2004.

Important, unfortunately, isn't the same thing as worthwhile or fun. Akimbo the company, based in San Mateo, has failed -- so far, at least -- to put any TV shows worth watching on its service. So this isn't a product any rational consumer should buy.

Yet Akimbo (www.akimbo.com) is still the first milestone in a massive transformation that will cause empires to crumble.

There are now three ways to watch TV at home: through a roof-top antenna, a cable connection or a satellite dish.

Each option requires hundreds of millions of dollars up front, for erecting TV transmitters, digging trenches for cable lines or launching satellites into orbit. These high costs require providers to allocate their precious channel space to programs aimed at the biggest possible audience -- explaining why there's relatively little offered for niche interests.

In contrast, there's almost no cost involved in distributing TV shows via the Internet. Producers could create highly specialized shows, perhaps appealing to an audience of only a few thousand nationwide or worldwide, and make a profit by charging only a few dollars.

The obstacle, until now, has been making it easy. Akimbo is the first Internet television service, as far as I know, that doesn't require using a personal computer. While there have been efforts to integrate PCs and TVs, most notably and recently with Microsoft's Windows XP Home Media Center Edition 2005, the logistics and cost of hooking TVs and PCs together is still daunting.

Akimbo succeeds, with a few rough edges, in making TV through Internet simple and inexpensive. But the company couldn't overcome the reluctance of Hollywood studios, broadcasters and other content owners to try a new approach, making Akimbo feel more like Limbo when you actually look at its paltry list of Grade Z programs.

Officially launched Oct. 25, Akimbo began shipping its boxes to customers in late October. The product can be ordered from the company's Web site, or through Amazon.com.

The hardware part of Akimbo is a silver set-top box about the size of a DVD player, selling for $229. Inside is an 80-gigabyte (GB) hard drive, capable of holding about 180 hours of programming. That's much more than equivalent digital video recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo, because Akimbo compresses its video files.

Broadband connection

Those video files are received through a broadband connection, such as a cable modem or DSL line. The Akimbo box hooks to a home router, a kind of switch box, either through a standard Ethernet cable or through an optional WiFi wireless adapter, and shares the broadband feed with your home computers.

The service part of Akimbo costs $9.99 a month, with the first three months free, giving you access to most of the company's program library. There is also premium content, including foreign-language programs and soon the same kind of soft-core porn found on cable and satellite systems, available either on a pay-per-view basis or with extra monthly fees.

You get programs through what Akimbo calls a ``queue and view'' system. Once Akimbo is installed and activated, a process that took only about 10 minutes at my house, you go to a ``Guide'' screen that lists programming channels. Within a channel, you select programs you want to watch.

These programs are then delivered through the Internet to your Akimbo's hard drive, and you can watch the programs as soon as they arrive.

Akimbo's compressed files, in the Windows Media Video or WMV format, occupy about 1 megabit per second. My cable modem runs at about 3 megabits per second, so I could get an one-hour show in 20 minutes.

Varied image quality

Shortly before going to sleep on the first night after setting up Akimbo, I went through the Guide and selected 17 hours of programs. They were all downloaded when I checked the box the next morning, about nine hours later.

Akimbo claims the image quality of its library is equivalent to VHS videotapes. I found that to be only partly true. Several programs I watched looked blurry, and pixilated into tiny squares when the action got fast. The company told me some of its programs were poorly encoded by their suppliers. That's understandable, but raises the obvious question of why Akimbo isn't enforcing basic quality control.

The bigger problem, however, is the lack of compelling programs. The Akimbo channels are filled with aging shows from British and Australian TV, ancient horror and science-fiction films in black and white, and music videos from bands you've never heard of. One example: Akimbo has ``The Wizard of Oz.'' Not the Judy Garland classic from 1939, but the silent Oliver Hardy version from 1925.

I did a rough tally last week and found only about 140 hours of programming in English available on Akimbo, less than the capacity of the player's hard drive. There was also about 50 hours of programs in Chinese and 20 in Spanish.

The typical cable or satellite system with 100 channels offers more programming choices in three hours than the entire Akimbo library, and you can record dozens of those hours with DVRs that cost less than Akimbo.

Akimbo is promising to expand its lame library, and has deals in place for TV shows from Turner Broadcasting System, whose holdings include CNN and the Cartoon Network, as well as recent pay-per-view movies from the CinemaNow service (www.cinemanow.com).

But these improvements may be too little, too late. Akimbo, to me, seems destined to be one of those pioneers with a clear vision of the promised land, nevertheless doomed to die in the desert on the way there.


By Mike Langberg

Mercury News