I was at Fry’s today with the kids, and while wandering around I came across the Akimbo. It’s an interesting device — a hardware player that downloads content over your Internet connection, and then plays those videos for you when you ask nicely. You can select what you want to download form their website, and they have a (smallish it seems to me) collection of commercial content.
They seem to be aiming at being the next iTunes store — you can get them to host your video blog, and they will make it available to their devices. You can even charge for people to watch your recorded rantings.
I see a couple of problems though:
- The device is expensive ($200 US is recommended retail, you can get them for $99 at the moment)
- This functionality would be trivial to implement in MythTV for free (in fact, I have been sitting on a python script that does this for MythTV since LCA — it just needs some cleanup before release)
- They use DRM
- Even worse, they use MS Windows DRM
I wonder if anyone has asked them if they’d be willing to allow a MythTV client?
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