MetaTV

» see metatv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

MetaTV was founded in 1999 in Mill Valley, California, on the idea that watching something on television and doing something on television should not be separate activities. Its first work was built against whatever boxes were already sitting under people's sets. InnMedia hired it for services aimed at Liberate set-top boxes. MSNBC hired it for services aimed at WebTV.

That turned out to be the wrong shape of business, because every operator ran different middleware and each contract meant starting over. So MetaTV built something closer to a browser for the set-top box, a layer that abstracted away the differences underneath while still reaching the specific capabilities of each unit. Cox deployed an early version of the result, focused on what the industry called unbound applications, meaning things you could pull up without regard to whatever program was on at the time.

On 13 July 2005, TV Works announced that it had bought MetaTV's business and assets. The price was not disclosed. Everyone stayed where they were in Mill Valley and Irv Kalick stayed on as chief executive, and Comcast's Mark Hess called the deal a natural fit. The name stopped being used.

~ the record ~

~ the money ~

Redpoint Ventures led the first round, $11 million, closed on 8 May 2000. The second round was $21 million in April 2002 and the lead investors were Comcast and Cox Communications, which is to say the two cable operators whose boxes MetaTV was writing for. Three years after that, the same two companies bought it.

The vehicle they bought it with says something too. TV Works had been assembled earlier in 2005 to hold the interactive television assets Comcast and Cox had just acquired from Liberate Technologies for $82 million. MetaTV was being poured into a container built out of another dead interactive-TV company.

~ the part that outlived it ~

In 2005 MetaTV contributed its binary wire protocol and its user agent specifications to CableLabs, where they became the basis of the interactive television standard called EBIF, the Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format. Once that was a public specification the TV Works team kept developing against it, and EBIF went on to ship in millions of set-top boxes across the United States, with trials at satellite and telephone company operators including Verizon.

So the technology won and the company did not get to be there for it. That is a normal outcome in infrastructure work, and it is also the reason nobody has heard of MetaTV: the thing it made was never supposed to have a name you would see.

~ the box i never had ~

American interactive television required an American cable operator's hardware in your living room. Turkish television in those years went from terrestrial analog to digital satellite, and whatever interactivity showed up arrived bundled inside the platform's own receiver rather than through a protocol written in Marin County. This whole category was plumbing that only existed if your provider bought it, which makes it invisible from outside its footprint in a way that even a dead website is not.

~ two dates for one ending ~

The English Wikipedia article says Comcast and Cox purchased the assets in April 2005. Comcast's own newsroom dated the TV Works announcement 13 July 2005, and informitv reported it the same day. The published date is the one used here, and the April in the encyclopedia has nothing behind it that I can find.

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