Dave Haynie - The Set-top Revolution

The Set-top Revolution

The Amiga Technologies experience, however, wasn't for naught. Some of the managers liked what they saw in Haynie and Finkel. In June 1996 he joined managers Stefan Domeyer and Geerd Ebeling a German startup company initially called PIOS Computer, later renamed to Metabox. Metabox was initially selling Apple Macintosh clones and attempting to sell Amiga follow-on systems based on the PowerPC processor. An attempt to get a license to AmigaOS failed. Instead the company sold BeOS to Apple Macintosh clones and BeBox to the German market. Thanks to a lucky hire of Thomas Rudloff, an Amiga/Macintosh CPU board wizard, Metabox shipped the first commercial Macintosh-compatible system to run at 300 MHz.

After Steve Jobs shut down Macintosh compatibles, Metabox went in a different direction: the advanced set-top box. The first effort, the Metabox 100, simply enabled users to cheaply access Metabox's ISP service—kind of a German WebTV. The follow-up Metabox 500 was one of the first multimedia STB's around, adding video and high quality audio.

The big plan, however, was for the Metabox 1000, a ground up new design in hardware and software. This system used a smallish 90 MHz Coldfire as the main processor, but allowed all kinds of modular upgrades: for video, for DTV, for encryption. It tuned analog TV, DVB, played DVD, MP3, accessed network resources, did fully functional Web browsing and email, etc. In short, one of the first multi-function STBs. The home grown system design was enhanced by an AmigaOS-like operating system designed by Andy Finkel and Carsten Schlote. This system won much praise from Metabox's targets (large cable and satellite companies), but the company started failing. This was due to both the bad financial climate of 2000-2001, rumors of fraud and other monkey business, and German local law which was forcing the company to stop paying the development team (many consultants and non-Germans), while they kept the local people (at their peak, Metabox employed about 260 people). Haynie was quoted as saying, at their peak, his shares were worth about US$5.6million (sales were locked out from the IPO); but by the time he left the company, they owed him US$75,000, which was never repaid.