Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 929 from 2003/7/13
From: Universe
I remember last Christmas I was reading about this, thinking about getting it. But it was brand new, had some disadvantages, and its concept and technology was open to question. Now it looks like Akimbo has successfully leapt some initial hurdles. They are still going a year later and got (wow!) some kind of partner arrangement ship with Amazon.
The downside of the system as I understand it is that you don't get a lot of content available "on the fly." You have to select the content you want and then Akimbo downloads it and you watch it later. People might not be happy with that. Certainly Americans who have the reputation of seeking immediate gratification might not accept it. But then you get some diversity with Akimbo, you see a lot of stuff that you're not likely to come across elsewhere. This part depends heavily on what sort of programming the Akimbo "network" wants to assemble for you.
Conceptually, it sounds like a variation of the vision that Bill Buck sometimes talked about, about delivering the content to the consumer wherever they go, and then the consumer pays a fee for this service. Would it work for MorphOS or on a Pegasos running something else? Well, no Akimbo wouldn't. They already have their own device that they sell and they have their service that they sell and so where is MorphOS and Pegasos in that? Somewhere on the chilly side of the front door.
If the Akimbo device is PPC-based then maybe Genesi could make them a better deal than whoever is their hardware partner now. I don't know how realistic that is. If the Akimbo device is not PPC-based then it's even less realistic because you also have to make a more difficult port of the X86 software. But then who knows maybe it is Linux-based and portable.
Another route would be to st- ermm, draw inspiration from the Akimbo model, and basically write the software and start your own service. You could hire somebody, say some large-footed MorphOS programmer who has done multimedia stuff before, or someone else who wants to do it, to write the software. And then he or she or someone else yet could be assigned the tasking of digging up video content on the Internet and linking to all of it with this propietary software, and the software displays things like a TV Guide with screenshots and you click on the shot to watch the program or, like Akimbo, download it for later viewing.
Maybe the software could be written in Hollywood, which is supposed to be good to do this front-end type of stuff with scripting. Maybe Genesi could come up with an Akimbo-style service on a prototype basis with a team of two or so people. So it could be reasonably low startup cost but it would be certainly be nothing as advanced or ambitious as Akimbo. The way I see it you're making a basic front-end scripting mPlayer and then paying some person to go and connect all the free video he or she can find and update the front end every day.
Pegasos2 G3, 512 megs RAM
