Akimbo has announced the release of its new co-branded RCA Akimbo Player. The Akimbo Player was announced back in January and was expected to be released in Spring, so it's a little late.The RCA Akimbo Player is a set-top box with a difference; unlike most set-top boxes which receive video from cable, satellite, analog, or Freeview sources, the RCA Akimbo Player brings you video from the internet.
Through Akimbo you can get a variety of video-on-demand content including movies from Movielink, news and TV episodes from the BBC, documentaries from National Geographic and much more.
In total, Akimbo offers 13,000 on-demand videos and movies from 200 content providers. The service spans seven languages with more content added weekly.
The RCA Akimbo Set Top Box is based on Thomson's IP1100 IPTV platform. It uses a number of advanced compression codecs to deliver quality video at lower bandwidths and can record up to 100 hours of video.
The Akimbo service is also available on PCs and other Media Centers running Windows Media Center Edition.
The player costs $199.99 and the video-on-demand service is $9.99 a month. A special pre-order price of $179.99 with two months free is available.
I'm sure it's not long before a service like Akimbo is mixed in with your regular cable or satellite subscription. In fact, many companies are making some headway in that direction, including TiVo and BSkyB.
1. Actually the set-top player has been out since Spring. The announcement is that they have a new co-branded RCA player.
http://www.akimbo.com/upgrade.html
Posted at 4:41PM on Sep 27th 2006 by Chris