Akimbo
Akimbo Service with Akimbo Player
- Conference
- DEMO 04
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Market Segment
- Funding Details
- VC-funded: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Sprout Group, Zone Ventures
- Competitors
- No direct competitors
- Product Description
- Akimbo is a company, a service and a product. Akimbo licenses special-interest programs from a variety of video providers and delivers them via broadband connections to televisions for viewing when subscribers want them. The Akimbo Service provides thousands of hours of programming in areas such as health and fitness, sports, education, youth, foreign language, independent film, cooking, and medicine. Using the Akimbo Guide, viewers select programs, which are automatically downloaded to the Akimbo Player, and available for watching when viewers choose.
- Market Opportunity
- The cost of transporting complex data, like video, over the Internet has decreased from $30 per gigabyte to under $1 per gigabyte. By mid-2004, Nielsen NetRatings expects the number of broadband-connected homes to be 50M. The recent availability of high-quality codecs (new ways to compress video for transfer on the Internet) allows Akimbo to deliver DVD-like quality at 1.5 megabytes per second. In addition, home networks have become much easier and less expensive to install, and Wi-Fi is built into many home-networking products. And with digital rights management systems becoming widely accepted, content providers are enthusiastic about using the Internet for distribution.
- DEMO Says
- Akimbo is the first company to put Internet broadcast video where it belongs: on the television. The Akimbo service aggregates video from a variety of specialty providers and delivers it to a sleek set-top box that stores up to 200 hours of DVD quality video. Although initial buyers will be videophile early adopters, the price and subscription model will make Akimbo the first choice in ex-pat TV. - CS