The first time we heard in detail about Akimbo from someone that actually had worked with the company, they said that it was never going to run out of money because the people behind it were really serious and the company was truly original. It turns out that this view has been eroded to the point where Akimbo has gone bust this week according to reports in investment web sites.
Akimbo invented a service whereby a DVR could take video content over the internet, mostly from its own servers, to create a set of TV services that looked like they were entirely different, personal channels. It was a little like online DVD rental ‘ order your programs, drop them to the DVR and play them later.
What we never spotted at the time was that there is an inherent problem with this. The service was perhaps good enough to stand on its own when it was first launched, using a dedicated $250 set top box which might download overnight and throughout the day, enough programming to create a prime time the following night, perhaps a 5 hour TV channel of your own making. But two things conspired against that ‘ the fact that more and more technology ‘ especially Flash Lite and Silverlight ‘ have addressed the problem of getting video of acceptable quality across the internet, and the fact that more and more devices have come to market which aim to do the same thing ‘ allow internet content to reach the PC, but without it being limited to one aggregator web site.
The vision around Akimbo seemed pretty bright at the time, but in retrospect it was perhaps a little small, and online web video services are never going to take off through TiVo like, one customer at a time, marketing methods ‘ instead the YouTube style viral services, which have the power overnight to scale to millions of viewers, were always likely to popularize web video.
A few months back Akimbo took another round of finance, supposedly $8 million, which was to be used, along with new management, to re-align the operation to let its core user interface and advertising designs become a paradigm for web video ‘ so that companies could use its software, not its aggregated content, to offer web video services. That new direction appears to be in tatters, just a few months after its inception,
The last lot of money came from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and Zone Ventures, and had it raised $8 million that would have taken its VC funding to $56 million. However press reports are suggesting that only $4 million of that money ever arrived, meaning the company only ever raised $52 million.
The entire staff is thought to have been laid off this week, except for a handful which are helping shutter the operation or keep it ticking over until an assets sale comes along.
Encoder manufacturer Harmonic, with its fledgling web video transcoder business Rhozet will be more that a little upset at Akimbo’s demise, because in April it landed a major win for its transcoding platform from Akimbo, so that every format of web video and every resolution, was available from a single server.
By adopting a business model where the unpredictability of the internet comes into play, it had to ensure its Content Publishing tools could output any resolution or format of video which a browser expected. What’s the betting that this is not the last we have seen of Akimbo and that someone picks up the assets and runs with them.