Smart TV & Sound -Guide to Digital Home Entertainment: “Akimbo Systems today announced that its video-on-demand service will be available on the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.” Very smart move on the part of Akimbo and Microsoft. I missed this the first time around last month. I’m assuming that you will not need to buy an Akimbo box in order to get this content on your MCE 2005 machine. It will be interesting to see how the pricing on this is going to work. Although I know that the Akimbo boxes don’t record high definition, what about an MCE box that could record high definition? How long until we get HDTV microcontent from Akimbo to our MCE 2005 boxes? I mean I’m sure it would be fun to watch “Naked News” on your 42″ plasma, but wouldn’t it be better in HDTV?
This is exactly where Microsoft needs to go in getting microcontent on to their Media Center PCs. Akimbo could be a platform for all microcontent delivery via the MCE machine. Rather than run the service through the online spotlight though, MCE should highlight this material in the form of “my microcontent” on the front page. I’m sure someone could devlop a very simple add on to do just this.