Akimbo - TV on Demand
Last week I discovered Akimbo for the first time and so far I love it. Basically, Akimbo is a box that sits next to your TV, similar to a Tivo. The unit acts like a Tivo in that it comes with a 80 GB hard-drive that is capable of storing 150 hours of television programming. You also have full controls when watching a show such as fast-forwarding, pausing, rewinding, etc.
The cool thing about Akimbo, however, is that it connects to your home network and downloads all of the programming over the internet. The guys at Engadget talk about how the downloading can be quite slow, which is true, but you can easily get 5-6 shows during the night while you’re sleeping. You can also connect to your Akimbo player over the internet and send shows to it - I actually sent shows to our Akimbo while I was at work and they were downloaded when I got home.
A lot of reviews on the internet are from people who don’t have the service but complain that there isn’t enough programming. If you are a TV junkie and you need several hours of shows per day then this is probably the case. For my wife and I, however, it is perfect. They offer Animal Planet, The History Channel, A&E, National Geographic, and more. Check out their channel guide for a list of everything that’s available. We usually watch network TV but it is nice to have some other options and now that most of our shows have ended we will probably mostly watch the Akimbo. They have a lot of premium upgrades that you can pay for on the Akimbo service, but the base service comes with more good programming than we could possibly watch.
The quality of the shows is quite good. The resolution is SD, which is what we got with DirectTV before. The control buttons, such as fast forward, pause, play, etc. are not quite as responsive as a Tivo is, but they are definitely acceptable.
So here’s the kicker - right now the box itself costs $69 (regular $200) and the service is only $10/month. We are getting all of the programming that we like from our old $50/month DirecTV service at 1/5 the cost. The only thing I’m not sure about is how often they update the content, but I’ve been checking their daily additions and it looks like it is pretty frequent. If you don’t want a high satellite or cable bill but you would like access to some pretty cool content I definitely recommend you check out Akimbo.
Oh, I almost forgot - so far all of the shows we have watched have been commercial-free. That’s a cool little bonus.
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[…] I recently wrote a post about using Akimbo, a way to watch television on-demand by downloading programming over the internet. So far the experience has been pretty good and it has really opened my eyes to other options for downloading programming over the internet. […]
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