Farewell, Dream Multimedia
I’m late with this one, I know: at the end of 2023 Dream Property GmbH, the company that made the Dreambox, went into liquidation, and I never wrote down what I think about it. I’ve been meaning to ever since, because for a long time this company was one of the very few that did what many of us in the embedded Linux scene only talked about — shipping a real consumer product with a real Linux distribution inside, into countless living rooms.
If you weren’t around for it: the Dreambox was a set-top box for satellite, cable and terrestrial TV that ran Linux and let you decide what to do with it. In the early 2000s that was close to unthinkable. The competition ran closed firmware you were not supposed to touch; the Dreambox gave you a shell, a package feed and a very active community that wrote plugins, skins and — let’s say it as it was — also the one or other thing that made the media industry’s lawyers nervous. Back then you could, with the right add-ons, watch Premiere (later Sky) and others without paying for a subscription, and you can imagine how much the people who sold those subscriptions loved that :D
I’ve always had a soft spot for how Dream handled this. To my knowledge they never shipped anything illegal. But they also never slammed the doors on users who retrofitted such things themselves. That’s a thin line to walk for years, and they walked it with one leg in the grey zone and the other firmly in the hardware business. I can’t think of another vendor that managed it.
Why this one hurts a bit
My connection is OpenEmbedded, which I co-founded. Dream used it for the Dreambox software. I wrote about it way back, when I got my own Dreambox 7025 — “the best free (as in free speech) sat receiver money can buy”. I didn’t buy it: Felix “tmbinc” Domke, one of the first people at Dream Multimedia, gave it to me because of OpenEmbedded.
What went wrong
My take, and I’m happy to be corrected by people who were closer to it: the clones. Once the hardware was cheap enough to copy, boxes from China showed up that looked much like a Dreambox, ran much the same software and cost a fraction. Dream had the head start, the community and the brand, and I’m convinced they could have stayed ahead. The development department, however, took the lead as a given and then slept through the years in which it was shrinking.
I’d love to be wrong about that.
The name lives on, in a way. The Dreambox brand was taken over by a dealer for receivers, who now sells an Android-TV-based streaming box under the name Dreambox Play. I wish them well, but an Android-TV streamer is a different animal from the Linux box that let you open the hood.
Thanks
To everyone who worked on those boxes — the developers, the support folks and the community around them: thank you. For me a Dreambox was proof that Linux in a consumer device could be fun, and for a few years it was the proof most of us could point at.
If you’ve got a Dreambox story, an old plugin you’re fond of or a favorite skin, I’m all ears — drop me a line. Mine still works, and thanks to the MediaPortal plugin it still has its merits :)
Cheers, :M: