Akimbo Confirms New Funding

Written by Frank Smith

Tuesday, March 4. 2008 at 05:45 PM EST Post a comment

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San Mateo, Calif.-based Akimbo Systems has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding to get its white-label video publishing strategy revving.

While previous reports place the amount of new funding at $8 million, Neil Goldberg, Akimbo's COO denies that figure's accuracy. An Akimbo spokesperson has confirmed that the amount of the new funding is $4 million.  

But he did say that VCs who'd contributed to prior funding rounds re-upped with new funding in this, Akimbo's fourth round. Investors in Akimbo include AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), Blueprint Ventures , and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) as well as Draper Fisher Jurvetson , Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers , and Zone Ventures.

Nine months ago Akimbo killed its set-top box services. It originally started out as a hardware provider, then shifted to a software provider, and is now focusing on offering content owners the ability to create video-rich Websites. "This was a natural progression but utilizes everything we'd developed in the last few years," says Goldberg.

The digital Internet video-on-demand company's new services will enable video publishers to run different ad-supported business models with transactional and subscription features as well as download capabilities. Publishers will also be able to customize the Akimbo player to match their Websites.

The decision to offer video publishing tools happened after executives at Akimbo were looking into monetizing Akimbo.com. "We interviewed these [white-label video publishers] and found that content owners didn't have full control," says Goldberg.

Offering total control of how the media is displayed, monetized, and used is what distinguishes Akimbo from competitors like Brightcove Inc. or thePlatform Inc. , he says.

"The Brightcoves of the world at the moment only have ad-supported streaming players. They don't have download or download-to-own or download-and-burn subscription models." Ad monetization, he suggests, means integrating with other companies like DoubleClick Inc. "We have a full ad solution," he says, explaining that Akimbo offers a complete billing system.

While this offers content owners a complete package of video publishing tools, companies like thePlatform work with other partners to offer customized tools. It recently announced a pre-integration program where content owners can publish videos with solutions offered by everyone from Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) to YouTube Inc. The message being that it can't offer everything itself, but that doesn't mean it can't offer its customers the best tools on the market.

Akimbo has already signed on MavTV, a male-centric video and gaming destination site as its first customer. "We've had a load of interest," says Goldberg. "We weren't counting on getting studio-level guys, but in truth we've had meetings with bigger guys and have seen interest."

Goldberg declined to comment on these studio-level deals but says Akimbo will announce a content deal in the second quarter of 2008.

As to what Akimbo's new strategy means: "I've become a non-believer in [content] aggregators and want to give control back to the content owners. Some of these aggregators will have a hard time in the future and I feel the same about set-top box manufacturers."

Updated: Includes comment on Akimbo's $4 million in funding.