MetaTV was founded in 1999 on the promise of providing a better way to consume interactive content on TV. Initially, MetaTV created technologies to target existing

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

infrastructure. Early customers included InnMedia (services targeted to Liberate set-top boxes) and

MSNBC MSNBC (originally the Microsoft National Broadcasting Company) is an American news-based pay television cable channel. It is owned by NBCUniversala subsidiary of Comcast. Headquartered in New York City, it provides news coverage and political ...

(services targeted to WebTV). In order to enable a better consumer experience and provide cross set-top and cross MSO capabilities, MetaTV shifted to developing a set-top box browser-like application to provide common functions across set-top boxes (abstracting middleware behaviors) and to exploit individual set-top box capabilities. With the help of Redpoint Ventures, MetaTV raised initial funding of $11M on May 8, 2000. MetaTV’s second round of funding for $21M, in April 2002, was led by Cable giants

Comcast Comcast Corporation (formerly known as American Cable Systems and Comcast Holdings),Before the AT&T merger in 2001, the parent company was Comcast Holdings Corporation. Comcast Holdings Corporation now refers to a subsidiary of Comcast Corpora ...

and

Cox Communications Cox Communications, Inc. (also known as Cox Cable and formerly Cox Broadcasting Corporation, Dimension Cable Services and Times-Mirror Cable) is an American digital cable television provider, telecommunications and home automation services. It i ...

. Cox went on to deploy a precursor of the EBIF cable standard developed by MetaTV that focused on unbound applications, which are available independent of a current video program. In 2005, MetaTV contributed the binary wire protocol and user agent specifications to become the basis for the CableLabs standard for interactive television known as EBIF (Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format). In April 2005, Comcast and Cox purchased the assets of MetaTV and rolled the assets and people into TVWorks, the joint software venture between the parties, originally formed to house the assets purchased from Liberate Technologies. The TVWorks team continued to evolve the EBIF specification and to develop the surrounding technology necessary to deploy implementations of the now public specification. The EBIF technology is deployed in millions of set-top boxes across the US and has also been trialed by Satellite and Telco service operators - including Verizon.

References

External links

ETV Specifications

ETV Example - Dallas Mavericks

ETV Example - HSN
{{Comcast Interactive television Comcast subsidiaries