KiSS Technology

» see kiss-technology.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Around 2003 the question you asked about a DVD player in Turkey stopped being about the DVD part. The files people actually had were AVIs, usually a movie compressed down to fit one or two burned discs, and the only thing worth knowing about a player was whether it would read them. For a while the answer was almost always no, and then a Danish company made the answer yes.

KiSS Technology was founded in 1994 in Hørsholm, north of Copenhagen, and by the 2000s it had about sixty-five people and a product line of DVD players and recorders, with a set-top box for IPTV beside them. In 2003 it shipped the DR-450, which was the first DVD player that would read MPEG-4 video off a disc. In 2004 the DP-500 followed and the specification sheet had effectively become a list of every format then in circulation. That is a small engineering achievement described in a sentence, and in practice it was the difference between a player that was worth buying and one that was not.

How much of the mid-2000s living room ran on a hand-burned disc is a thing that has dropped out of the telling. Netflix was still mailing envelopes inside the United States and a Turkish ADSL line was measured in hundreds of kilobits, so the hard drive in the corner was where video lived. A player that accepted a disc of compressed files was the bridge from that hard drive to the television everybody actually watched, and the whole arrangement depended on the player also finding the subtitle file sitting next to the movie. That is the plumbing Turkey built an entire subtitle community on top of instead of a streaming habit.

~ the case file ~

~ the firmware argument ~

In January 2004 the MPlayer project went public with an accusation that KiSS was shipping firmware containing parts of MPlayer's GPL-licensed code while releasing none of that firmware under the GPL. This was not an unusual complaint in that era; consumer hardware was full of quietly borrowed open-source video code, and the GPL was only beginning to be treated as something a company could lose an argument about.

What made it memorable was the answer. KiSS's managing director, Peter Wilmar Christensen, replied that the similarity ran the other way, and that the MPlayer team had taken code from KiSS's firmware. The release timeline of the two code bases does not support that reading, and the episode is still cited as one of the early examples of a hardware vendor's first instinct being to reverse the accusation.

~ bought and absorbed ~

On 22 July 2005 Cisco announced it would buy KiSS Technology for its Linksys division, paying roughly 61 million dollars in cash and stock. The logic was straightforward from Cisco's side: Linksys sold home networking, KiSS sold the box that put networked video on a television, and in 2005 everybody believed the living room was about to be won by whoever shipped the device in the middle. The Los Angeles Times framed the purchase as Cisco setting up a fight with TiVo.

The deal closed on 6 September 2005. Linksys said it would keep selling the existing KiSS products in Europe and build a worldwide line on top of them. What arrived instead was nothing much. The engineers went into Linksys and the brand went quiet, while the specific thing KiSS had been good at got solved by every cheap player on the market inside two or three years. By the time codec support mattered again it was a question about streaming, and the company that had won the first round of it had been part of Cisco for a decade.

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