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.)