Last night Carol came home and we watched The Carol and Steve Show on TV!
I'm evaluating the Akimbo Service and am one of the first videobloggers to have my vlogs available for viewing along with Clint Sharp, Rocketboom and Shai Coggins of Freshwave.TV
INSTALLATION
I hooked the Akimbo up wirelessly to my Apple Airport using the included wireless adapter. After a brief pause for setup, a progam guide appears and you choose progams that you'd like to watch. After choosing the programs, the Akimbo unit schedules them for download.
I took this oportunity to have dinner.
WATCHING VLOGS ON TV
A little while later I checked the Akimbo unit and the shows that I had selected for download were available for watching.
I'm a huge fan of TV and actually seeing my show being displayed on TV was a rush. It's different than watching videos on a computer.
MAKING BIGGER SHOWS
Now that my content needs to be bigger to show clearly on a TV, I've worked with Sean Gilligan of vblogcentral to have him encode my videos into 640x480 WMV.
THE VISON OF WATCHING VLOGS ON TV
For months and months Jay Dedman has been trying to get us to think about a future where people would be able to watch our vlogs on TV. I'd questioned that vision bacause when the vlog gets put on TV it looses some the things that make it a video blog.
Akimbo does have a small text area that displays a portion of the blog post's text, but it doesn't have any of my embedded links. There's no way to leave comments either.
I added an email address at the end of my video, for Akimbo viewers, so they can email me comments. we'll see if I get any.
Akimbo does have a subscription method, so you can subscribe to a vlog and have all new shows automatically downloaded. That's cool. It uses my RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for that!
Carol never thought The Carol and Steve Show would get on TV. On January 1st of this year I made a New Years resolution to create The Carol and Steve Show to get Carol involved in videoblogging.
I told her that if we kept up a regular schedule of shows, anything could happen. I said at that time that we could even end up on TV. She never thought it would only take five months.
It's exciting. I'll be following this area very closely, who knows where it could lead?