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Backstories
Broadcast-Quality Movies Online
Produced by Bill Birney Microsoft Corporation April 2005
This month we visit Akimbo, an online movie store that uses Windows Media to deliver broadcast-quality movies to televisions over the Internet. Akimbo has a large and rapidly expanding selection of movies and television shows, as well as a large variety of alternative content, like independent shorts and training videos.
Users find content on the Akimbo site by surfing titles on over 80 channels. The basic monthly fee covers a large number of channels, with more content available on a per-title rental or monthly subscription basis. Users can search by title, or choose based on user recommendations.
To achieve quality comparable to satellite or cable, the content is downloaded and played out to a TV through the Akimbo player set-top box (STB). The 80-gigabyte (GB) hard disk in the STB can hold up to 200 hours of Windows Media-formatted video. Users can order, view, and manage content from the UI on their television or by accessing their My Akimbo account via a browser.
Movies On-Demand Direct to Your TV
 Watch the video!
(300 Kbps, 3:41)
Steve Shannon, Akimbo CEO and founder, takes you on a tour of the user experience. The UI is designed to make finding content easy and fun, and to take the pain out of getting the content.
Inside Akimbo: Content
Watch the video!
(300 Kbps, 6:06)
Brandon Wirtz, media processing manager, describes how content gets from a tape to a Windows Media Video file. A custom encoding profile optimizes content for playback on the STB, and a high-output encoding farm handles the massive amount of content.
Inside Akimbo: Playback
Watch the video!
(300 Kbps, 2:51)
Senior software engineer Galan Bridgman cracks open the STB to show what's inside. Because content is stored locally, users can take their content with them in the Akimbo player.
Finding What You Didn't Know You Wanted
Watch the video!
(300 Kbps, 3:37)
In the future, Akimbo will provide an even wider, richer variety of content, and the advanced search technology to help users find what they want, when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it.
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