Videonomics - Initial Takes
CES created a whole lot of hype about the future VOD ecosystem. I think it's instructive to look at one of the players who's been around for a while now - Akimbo. Akimbo's play is fairly straightforward - aggregating video content and delivering it over the Net to an STB.
Now, the interesting bit to me is that Akimbo is
not disintermediating anybody (cable network, broadcast network, film distributor, etc). For example, CinemaNow is an Akimbo content provider.
That's interesting because if CinemaNow really believed that the media hub would converge everything coming into the living room on the net, it wouldn't supply Akimbo. In fact, it would be trying to outmaneuver Akimbo. Think about it this way: why would Akimbo need to exist in a world of generic STBs grabbing data from a thriving market of content providers, like CinemaNow?
But the fact that everyone's hedging every bet they can tells us that this market is still nowhere near coalescencing into a dominant design. In fact, it even tells us that the bits of the value chain are likely to go undergo radical redefinition as the market does begin to coalesce. Another bit of evidence for this is the deep shifts that are going on the hardware side (viz RGB Networks).