According to Om Malik, Akimbo will now be sending their hardware line to the undertakers which will see the end to the Akimbo RCA VOD box.

The company will now be switching its focus to licensing to the AT&T Homezone package, attracting new content partners and its new XP/Vista VOD software client.

Friend of WebTVWire.com, Gilbert Hammer of IPTV Evangelist, has been very busy interviewing a selection of people working in and around the online video industry.

Interviews include:

• Sibley Verbeck – CEO of The Electric Sheep Company
• Jerry Paffendorf - Resident Futurist of The Electric Sheep Company
• John C. Martin – Director of Product Marketing at Reallusion
• Ashley Heather – CEO Entertainment Media Works
• Jim Funk – Co-founder and VP of marketing at Akimbo
• Robert Petty – CEO of RooTV

There’s over 2 hours of interviews with these people and more over at the IPTV Evangelist interview section (elegantly powered by Brightcove).

Interview with Jim Funk of Akimbo

To give you a taste of all the interviews here is the interview with Jim Funk, the VP of marketing over at Akimbo.

IPTV Evangelist interviews

AT&T Homezone is a mish-mash IPTV/satellite TV service which features live TV from the DISH network, movie downloads from MovieLink and TV shows from Akimbo. The Homezone box does support DVR functionality but is not High Definition (HD) ready.

Yahoo! has had its eyes on entering the living room for some time and is in a much better position to do so when it compares itself to Google. Its got a good partnersip with TiVo, PC DVR software, successful internet video services and a deal with Akimbo.

Yahoo! and TiVo

Yahoo! already has a strong partnership with TiVo with a number of Yahoo! services such as Yahoo! Weather and Yahoo! photos available through the TiVo box.

Also Yahoo! partnered with TiVo to allow its Yahoo! TV Guide to work with TiVo allowing remote scheduling through the Yahoo TV guide website. Because of this already inherent relationship with TiVo it has been said before that TiVo would make a good takeover candidate for Yahoo! to really bring it into the living room.

The Consumer Electronics Show 2007 (CES2007) has kicked off today bringing us a flood of technology announcements and new hi-tech products that will be hitting the market this year.

Among the announcements is that AT&T has teamed up with Akimbo to offer the Akimbo Video on Demand service to AT&T Homezone subscribers. While this is not the biggest news from the CES today it is worth mentioning as this news will be otherwise overshadowed by the other big announcements coming out of CES this week.