Metabox

» see metabox.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The company started in 1996 as PIOS Computer AG, founded in Hildesheim by engineers and managers who had just come out of Amiga Technologies. Dave Haynie was among them, and so were Peter Kittel and Andy Finkel, and the chief executive Stefan Domeyer had run Amiga Technologies himself. The plan was PowerPC machines: PReP boxes that would run the Mac operating system under license, sold as clones. Two of them, the Keenya and the Magna, won benchmark comparisons outright. Then Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 and ended the clone program, and the entire product line had nowhere to go.

What survived the clone shutdown was the accelerator business. PIOS sold PowerPC cards for Apple machines under the JoeCard name and designed a version for Amiga hardware called AmiJoe, with outside programmers writing a native operating system for it. Alongside that it was building internet set-top boxes, the MB50 and then the MB500, the second of which ran on OS/2. There was even an in-house editorial team producing internet television. The company renamed itself met@box, then Metabox, and in 1999 started on the thing it would be remembered for.

The Metabox 1000, also called Phoenix, was a modular set-top box on a Coldfire processor, meant to do DVD playback and hard disk recording in one unit, with digital terrestrial broadcast and the European interactive TV standard planned on top. In 1999 that specification sat well ahead of anything else under a television. It was also, as it turned out, ahead of what the company could build. The hardware never reached a shippable state and the encryption software kept slipping, and every delay happened in public because the shares were listed on the Neuer Markt.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the box under the television ~

Interactive television assumes the house already has a fast line coming into it, and in 2000 the fastest thing in mine was a dial-up account. The German argument about who would own the box under the TV was taking place somewhere I could read about and not join. TTNet did not put ADSL in front of me for years after that, and by the time it did, the screen people browsed on at home was still the PC monitor. Nothing ever got plugged into the back of the television except a disc player.

~ one notice in April ~

On 10 April 2000 Metabox published an ad-hoc notice saying a foreign company had signed with one of its subsidiaries for 500,000 digital multimedia boxes, at a value given as around 500 million marks. Ad-hoc publicity is a disclosure channel with legal force behind it, which is exactly why nobody screens what goes into it in advance. The share stood at 38.90 euros before the notice went out and traded as high as 83.80 after it.

There was a signed document, but it was a letter of intent rather than a purchase contract, and the board would not name the counterparty even when asked directly. That refusal is what brought the financial press down on the company. Several reporters and market commentators began stating that the company had broken the law, which at the time nobody could prove, and prosecutors eventually opened an investigation into the people running it. The share collapsed. In the middle of all this Metabox cut its revenue forecast and blamed delays in the encryption software.

The Landgericht Hildesheim convicted Stefan Domeyer in July 2004 of driving the share price up with a false mandatory disclosure. He got seven months suspended and a condition to pay 10,000 euros. He appealed, and at the end of 2005 the Bundesgerichtshof threw the appeal out without finding any error in the Hildesheim judgment.

~ the filing that got withdrawn ~

Metabox applied to open insolvency proceedings in May 2001, and then did something almost no listed company does: it took the application back. A shareholders' association had organized itself around the company and taken control of it from the inside, a process Die Zeit wrote up that August under the title "Schleichende Entmachtung", creeping loss of power. The application was pulled at the last minute at the start of November 2001. Early in April 2002 the board announced it was leaving the Neuer Markt anyway. On 30 August 2002 it filed for insolvency a second time, and in October the remaining Metabox 1000 developers were let go. The shareholders bought the company fifteen more months and one more ending.

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