Akimbo, Current and the Future of TV

AKIMBO, CURRENT COULD EMBODY TV's NEXT GENERATION
[SOURCE: USAToday]
Two decades ago, if you wanted to see how cable would change TV, you might've visited Turner Broadcasting and MTV, just to soak up what was going on. Today, there's no question the Internet is going to alter television -- not make TV go away, but make it different. So whom do you visit to check out where this is heading? Al Gore's Current and Akimbo. At Current, people are thinking about television in a very different way. Current is using the Internet to make its viewers a meaningful part of the TV channel. More than 30% of the segments on Current are produced by amateurs and are sent in through the website. Here's how the system works: Anyone can use a digital video camcorder to create a five-minute story -- or “pod” in the Current lingo -- and upload it to www.current.tv. Then the site's users view the pods and vote on them. The pods that rise to the top -- a sliver of the number sent in -- are considered for the Current TV channel. Akimbo is an interesting soup of technologies. The company sells a box that's something like a TiVo. It has a monster hard drive that can store hundreds of hours of video and an on-screen navigation system for finding what you want. Akimbo's box hooks to the Internet and to your TV. Through the Internet, the Akimbo box connects to Akimbo's servers, which store and sell video from 150 programmers. Some of it is stuff you could find on cable TV -- Discovery Channel documentaries, Cary Grant flicks from Turner Classic Movies. A lot of it is stuff you'd never find on regular TV. None of it is prime-time network fare such as Lost. The result is niche video-almost-on-demand, for a basic fee of $10 a month. You go through Akimbo's menus and click on something you want to watch -- but then wait, because the program must download onto the hard drive, which can take 20 minutes for an hourlong show. Akimbo is using the Internet to get around cable TV's limitations on the number of channels that can be offered; it's using the hard-drive downloads to get around the Internet's limitations on speed and bandwidth; and it's cutting deals with mainstream programmers such as Discovery to get around the shortage of high-quality, mass-market programming on the Web. Put together, Akimbo is a peek at what will happen when video entertainment comes in from anywhere — cable, broadcast, Internet — and viewers can see anything they want, pretty much any time they want.
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/money/20051026/maney26.art.htm