Akimbo, Free preview trial
Oct 26, 2005 in Tech, Game, MCE, griffon
Well my off the cuff impression of Akimbo for MCE is not so good. This is not the killer MCE app I was looking for.
I think I approached with an open mind, I didn’t have any particular expectations after looking at the web site, but thought hey some anima and other stuff might be good and worth signing up for.
The premise. Akimbo wants to charge ten bucks a month to deliver their content over your bandwidth (it boggles my mind that anyone would get a dedicated cable like box for this service, but I digress, and that type of box has never been my preference).
My DSL line is a little anemic but hey I figured I could probable mange.
That is only the tip of the iceberg in fees though. Besides the monthly fee, almost every single show I looked at has a fee on top of it, seemly always around two bucks or so. Some as high as five. All the Anima had a price tag, all the marital arts stuff or movies….
Ooo I can watch the travel channel fro free :p, I don’t even watch that crap on Sat in HD I’m sure as hell not going to pay monthly for it a second time. Buy hey maybe that is just me.
Everything has an expiration date on it, free content (what there is of it that is not utter rubbish) is 7 days, paid seems to be 30. Now what the hell, this is going to a DVR, why would I pay for something that is just going to expire, it’s MY disk space and my bandwidth it was delivered over, this should pretty much makes it my property at least in regards to how long I want to keep it. I really don’t understand this approach it is very 1980 but guess that is where the content owners are still stuck.
I might put up with a few restrictions to get access to a incredible huge Netflix size library, sadly not going to happen any time soon, but certainly not for this paltry offering that you have to pay for repeatedly.
I couldn’t find cartoon network on the channel list, maybe it’s not for MCE or something lame like that, really one of the only things that sounded interesting. I’ll have to see if they have updated their lineup listing for MCE, the prerelease stuff was a pretty vague.
All and all there where a grand total of two channels that I’m interested in but won’t use (fee’s all the way down) and a couple others that might be interesting but are a mix of free and fee and frankly the whole things is annoying enough to put me off for good, but I’m going to see if a couple of the kids shows are any good for Kaily
Oh yeah, the UI embedded in MCE seems to be very flaky, I was getting frequent time out’s (load from their new release on MCE maybe the culprit) and other navigational errors pretty constantly. Things like the channel buttons suddenly moving you left instead of up, all would return to normal after hitting enter on something then going back, but it kept happening.
The UI looks like they might have dome some half baked port of their box UI and failed to really shake out the bugs.
I’ll probable post something more towards the end of the 30 day trial but off hand I doubt I will even point out how to use it to Charise, I can tell it would only confuse and irritate her, not a good state to have an already wounded wife in.
Akimbo, so promising, so not even close.
Edit:
The Akimbo rep guy was kind enough to stop by and made a few comments. Setting aside the marketing speak, I do love a company that listens and while I’m not impressed as of yet with this offering, that goes a long way with me. Those that listen (and actually hear) generally will be succeed, in the long run.
He correctly points out that this is a free Preview trial and it’s limited in its content and scope.
Fair enough, but lets all remember about first impressions. Seems to me they might want to rethink what they are offering. I don’t enjoy getting milked for fees (*shakes a fist at wells fargo, and just about everyone else*) and that is what I walked way feeling like it was all about.
