Sayonara, Akimbo

Akimbo was one of the first set-top boxes that tried to use an Internet connection to deliver "long tail" content. While it wasn't possible for just anybody to send their video content to an Akimbo user, the company was open to doing all sorts of deals with all sorts of aggregators. They were truly ahead of their time.

But Akimbo realized it was going to be hard to build a significant base of users of a new piece of hardware (the "TiVo problem"), and switched to a different strategy: peddling the content library it had put together to other companies. That didn't work out, and now Akimbo is calling it quits, according to GigaOm and NewTeeVee.

I wrote about some of the challenges facing Akimbo in 2005, for Release 1.0 (PDF here.)

From Last Week's Web Video Summit: Audio of Panel on Internet Video Distribution

One of the serendipitously swell things about attending the Web Video Summit in San Jose last week was bumping into Joel Heller, who runs the site Docs That Inspire. When I told him I wasn't going to be able to attend the panel on distribution, he offered to record it for me. After getting each of the speakers' permission, we're posting it here. (Thanks, Joel!)

Here's the description of the panel:

You and Your Audience: Distribution

A service, a network or do it yourself? Everyone wants to host your video, as money has poured in for video sites ever since Google bought YouTube. Many promises, many choices, far too many disappointments as you try to stand out from the hundreds of thousands of other producers. Tom Hammer at Akimbo manages possibly the world's largest library of professional video, from Rocketboom to the BBC. Comcast's thePlatform and Vitalstream/Internap deliver video from ABC to the Wall Street Journal. Bittorent is proving peer to peer works for producers as well as pirates. Bring your question and get answers from the key players in this intense session.

PANELIST: Ian Blaine, CEO, thePlatform
PANELIST: Tom Hammer, CTO and VP of Engineering and Operations, Akimbo
PANELIST: Philip N. Kaplan, Chief Strategy Officer, Internap
PANELIST: Tim Napoleon, Media and Entertainment Product Line Director, Akamai
PANELIST: Ashwin Navin, President and Co-founder, BitTorrent Inc.
MODERATOR: Eric Savitz, West Coast Editor, Barron's

Not surprisingly, there were some interesting sparks between the execs from Akamai and BitTorrent. The file is here, in MP3 form.