Akimbo

» see akimbo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the first time i heard the name akimbo was in 2026, in a list of failed pre-netflix vod startups. i had no memory of it from its actual run. it was a us product, sold at us retail, with a us content catalog, in the years 2004 to 2008 when my own internet was an adsl line in ankara and the closest thing i had to a streaming box was a desktop pc with windows media player open.

akimbo systems was founded around 2002 by steve shannon, a former executive at replaytv, the dvr brand that lost the early-2000s tivo war. the company announced its consumer product in february 2004 and shipped the hardware in october of that year. the device was a $200 to $300 set-top box, built by thomson, that connected to a broadband line and pulled video from akimbo's catalog to local storage for tv playback. the subscription cost about $10 a month and the content catalog at peak included roughly 200 partners.

none of that was enough. about a month after launch, akimbo had around 120 active set-top boxes, sixty of which were running inside the company or at investors' homes. on a typical month only about twenty of those boxes downloaded any content at all. by june 2008 the company was out of money and out of patience. it shut down on 2 june 2008, taking $56 million of at&t, cisco, and disney venture investment with it.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

steve shannon's pitch had been straightforward. broadband was reaching enough american homes to support internet video, but the tv set in the living room did not know how to connect to it. akimbo would bridge the gap with a dedicated appliance. the launch catalog included cnbc, cartoon network, and vh1 uno on the major-brand side, plus a long tail of independent providers ranging from turkish-language programming to british drama imports. at&t put real money in early and integrated akimbo content into its homezone set-top product in december 2004.

the pricing was where it broke. the box itself cost $200 retail, sometimes $300 with the better storage tier. on top of that, the monthly subscription unlocked some content, but a lot of catalog items were paid downloads on top of the subscription. the buyer signed up for hardware money, subscription money, and per-title money before watching anything.

~ the slide ~

in october 2005, akimbo pivoted to akimbo for media center, a windows software plugin that ran on existing pcs without the dedicated hardware. that bought time but did not solve the catalog or pricing problems. on 1 august 2007 the original video-on-demand service was wound down, and the company spent its last nine months trying to become a whitelabel video provider, selling the back end to other companies who would put their own brand on the front.

youtube launched in february 2005, four months after akimbo's box hit retail. by 2007 youtube had been bought by google and was running free user-uploaded video on any pc with a browser. akimbo's paid model had no answer.

~ what got buried with it ~

roku launched its first standalone streaming box in may 2008, four weeks before akimbo shut down. the roku price was $99, the catalog ran inside subscriptions people already had like netflix, and the device did not ask anyone to pay per show on top of the box. that was the model akimbo had reached for and missed by about three years and a hundred dollars. the akimbo brand left no consumer trace. the at&t homezone partnership was unwound, the at&t set-top hardware was retired, and the $56 million was logged as a writedown.

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