Akimbo, Current Media could embody TV's next generation
October 26, 2005
By Kevin Maney
SAN FRANCISCO - Music blares from speakers mounted on a lime-green truck, and a dude in a red leather jacket, flip-flops and spiked hair coaxes me aboard and into the truck's "video confessional booth."
I sit in the darkened cube facing a video camera. The truck belongs to Al Gore's new cable-and-Web operation, Current Media, and is parked right outside Current's headquarters. The spiked-hair guy says I should confess anything, and the truck will send it to the Current.tv website - which, in some cases, feeds content to Current's cable channel, reaching 20 million viewers.
I consider unburdening about Becky and the Marshmallow Fluff in the coat room at the frat party the night after John Lennon died, but ... nah.
Besides, I'm here on a mission: to glimpse the next iteration of television.
Two decades ago, if you wanted to see how cable would change TV, you might've visited Turner Broadcasting and MTV, just to soak up what was going on. Today, there's no question the Internet is going to alter television - not make TV go away, but make it different. So whom do you visit to check out where this is heading?
Could be a lot of contenders, but while I'm in San Francisco, I can hit two on the same day: Current and Akimbo.
First stop is Current, in a happening district near the new baseball stadium. At a company founded by Gore, you'd expect to find employees who wear neatly pressed Lands' End outfits and dance with all the grace of a person hooked up to a heart defibrillator. But everybody at Current is excruciatingly hip. The men have messy hair and long Elvis sideburns, and women wear things such as fur boots.
These people are thinking about television in a very different way. Current is using the Internet to make its viewers a meaningful part of the TV channel. More than 30% of the segments on Current are produced by amateurs and are sent in through the website.
Here's how the system works: Anyone can use a digital video camcorder to create a five-minute story - or "pod" in the Current lingo - and upload it to www.current.tv. Then the site's users view the pods and vote on them. The pods that rise to the top - a sliver of the number sent in - are considered for the Current TV channel.
Before launch, Current executives thought they'd be lucky to get enough good-quality content from viewers to fill maybe 5% of airtime, says Joanna Drake Earl, who runs Current's Web operations. But they were amazed at what came in. "It looks and feels different, but we love the rawness," she says.
So the channel has wound up with pods about religious-themed haunted funhouses, amateur kickball and young Afghans who work out with weights while admiring 1970s posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
For the past decade, the Internet has opened the door for people and subjects that wouldn't otherwise make it into mainstream media. Current is now using that opening to change mainstream media. And the industry is paying attention.
"Sneer if you wish, but Al Gore may actually have a successful TV channel on his hands," writes critic Rob Long in National Review.
Next stop: Akimbo. This time, at the San Francisco residence of Will Hearst, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a lead investor in Akimbo. He is a grandson of William Randolph Hearst, who shook up another established medium - newspapers - 100 years ago.
Akimbo is an interesting soup of technologies. The company sells a box that's something like a TiVo. It has a monster hard drive that can store hundreds of hours of video and an on-screen navigation system for finding what you want. Akimbo's box hooks to the Internet and to your TV.
Through the Internet, the Akimbo box connects to Akimbo's servers, which store and sell video from 150 programmers. Some of it is stuff you could find on cable TV - Discovery Channel documentaries, Cary Grant flicks from Turner Classic Movies. A lot of it is stuff you'd never find on regular TV. For instance, there's Bollywood TV (shows from India), Brain Damage Films ("The ultimate in independent horror movies") and Naked News ("The first Internet news show to use nude anchorwomen"). None of it is prime-time network fare such as Lost.
The result is niche video-almost-on-demand, for a basic fee of $10 a month. You go through Akimbo's menus and click on something you want to watch - but then wait, because the program must download onto the hard drive, which can take 20 minutes for an hourlong show. "It's faster than Netflix," Hearst jokes. Netflix sends rented DVDs by mail.
Akimbo is using the Internet to get around cable TV's limitations on the number of channels that can be offered; it's using the hard-drive downloads to get around the Internet's limitations on speed and bandwidth; and it's cutting deals with mainstream programmers such as Discovery to get around the shortage of high-quality, mass-market programming on the Web.
Put together, Akimbo is a peek at what will happen when video entertainment comes in from anywhere - cable, broadcast, Internet - and viewers can see anything they want, pretty much any time they want. As of Tuesday, the Akimbo service is available on Microsoft Media Center computers, which Microsoft hopes will become entertainment hubs for homes.
As with Current, the industry is paying attention. "Three years ago, we would go to the major programmers, and we'd be talking to blank stares and scowls," says Akimbo CEO Josh Goldman.
Perhaps Akimbo and Current should work together, putting Current's content on Akimbo's service. As of my visit, they had not talked. Akimbo could even offer a spinoff, The Video Confessional Channel - an endless stream of divulgences from inside the truck's booth.
Just keep that thing away from me.
Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/maney/2005-10-25-tv-next-gen_x.htm