Akimbo's IP video-on-demand gets hooked into Windows Media Center
The Windows Media Center announcements keep on coming! The latest comes from Akimbo, which says that beginning early next year their video-on-demand TV over IP service will be "accessible" from PCs running Microsoft's new Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. It sounds like they'll be doing something similar to TVTonic (which we wrote about a few weeks ago) and offering a plug-in for Media Center PCs, but the difference with Akimbo is that you pick and choose the programs you want to watch which are then automatically downloaded to your PC's hard drive.
Of course, they omit all the juicy details from their press release, like how much it'll cost and what kinds of programming they'll offer, but it'll probably be along the lines of the service they offer now via their standalone player, which includes video-on-demand of CNN, iFilm, the Cartoon Network, a bunch of porno, a lot of weird sports channels we've never heard of, and a bunch of other stuff you probably aren't willing to pay good money to watch (the basic package costs ten bucks a month, but all the premium channels and shows cost extra). Not exactly much there yet, but it's not that we aren't hyped on the idea of IP TV or anything—we're dying to kick Time Warner Cable to the curb—it's just that something like this all comes down to the programming. At the end of the day hardly anyone cares about the technology involved (except us), they just want something good to watch.
