• Internet service providers: Comcast is a cable provider and AT&T has its U-Verse and HomeZone IPTV offerings, and both companies have their own set-top boxes and on-demand movie and television offerings. Plus the two generally compete only against each other in many markets. Which means neither has much of an incentive to increase speeds to those that could provide the Roku box with the HDTV signal it reportedly supports. Comcast has shown that it will throttle bandwidth for specific applications, and then lie about it to the FCC.
• Movie studios: I've used the Netflix feature to watch movies online and the selection isn't particularly impressive. Reports peg available titles at 10,000, with a handful of television shows thrown in. Netflix will have to go over the heads of the DVD distributors it has relationships with directly to the studios if it wants current content.
• Surly adopters: Fool me once with Akimbo, the Apple TV, or Unbox over TiVo, shame on you. Fool me twice with the Roku? Shame on you. The gadgetophile market is probably wary of cluttering their home theaters with yet another clunker. The key will be to get the chipset Roku has developed for the box built into new TVs. Only then can Netflix count on the kind of mainstream audience that will convince the studios and the ISPs that the project can't be ignored.

It's true. I used to work for them over 2 years ago and all of my friends that were there are now gone. They laid off the last of them today. It's sad but LONG OVERDUE. Akimbo is now officially dead although the heartbeat died over a year ago.

Not even the HR person knew about it until the rest of the employees were notified (in an impromptu all-hands meeting in the middle of our normal lunch hour - how obnoxious!). The execs, of course, had to have known about it the day before, and one of them even assured some of us yesterday that we had "nothing to worry about" in terms of the health of the company or job security.

It seems like the CEO was hoping he'd be able to swoop in at the last minute and play the hero. Unfortunately, such was not meant to be. They're only keeping all of the execs and high-level managers, a couple of engineers, the accountant, the HR person, and a little flunky who filled a position that wasn't even open at the time of his interview. Apparently he is related to or knows a friend of the CEO. What the hell were they thinking?!?

It's all a bit shady if you ask me. Clearly the board thought so, too.

Services like iTunes, working with the Apple TV set-top box, and Xbox 360's Marketplace, offer a limited but growing library of TV shows and movies. Netflix, the DVD rent-by-mail service, is hiring hardware engineers. Amazon, currently a TiVo partner, is rumored to be working on a media-playing device of its own. And more networks are beefing up Web-enabled viewing like ABC's HD-like experience and ESPN 360. To top it off, there's the enigma that is Vudu, a set-top box that's built to replicate Netflix's level of service by offering a host of first-run, DVD-quality movies.

What TiVo has going for it is its ability to record live broadcasts, much of which never turns up on DVD or online video libraries. It also has mainstream appeal compared to Web-video downloads or multitasking game consoles and personal computers. But increasingly, it's going to be hard to convince consumers to buy a separate gadget and make room for it in their living room, when the devices they already have — PCs, game consoles, and even portable media players — can provide the same basic service of delivering video.

Microsoft, in particular, is trying to market the Xbox as a set-top box replacement, especially for phone companies trying to deliver video over Internet connections, a technology known as IPTV. That, more than anything, is what's likely spurring Sony's DVR move — and with Sony, Apple, and Microsoft sparring over the living room, there's going to be little room left for TiVo.