Metz and COOCAA: what they ship with and what comes off
· 8 min read
| Who is behind them | Skyworth, on both brands |
|---|---|
| European company | Metz Consumer Electronics GmbH, Zirndorf |
| Register | AG Nürnberg HRB 31763, identical on all three sites |
| Declared plant | Metz Display Polska, Nowa Wieś Wrocławska |
| METZ blue system | Google TV on ten models, Roku on two, none on one |
| COOCAA system | Five Google TV, five Roku, one TiVo, one with no system |
| Metz Classic | Metz's own software, not Android |
| Updates in EPREL | 8 years on nearly every record seen |
| Memory | Neither site publishes RAM or storage |
| In the directory | Metz, no rows at all; COOCAA, one, and it is a player |
There are three ways to sell a television under a name that is not yours. License the brand and build nothing, like JVC or Blaupunkt. Build it and sign it with your own name, like Sony or Hisense. And then the case in between, which almost nobody covers.
Metz and COOCAA belong to Skyworth. These are not borrowed names: there is a real German company behind them, with a plant and with service. But the Skyworth name is not on the box, not on the bezel and not in the legal notice.
One legal notice for three websites
This takes two minutes to check and it settles the matter. The imprints of
metz-ce.de, metzblue.com and coocaa.eu give exactly the same details:
Metz Consumer Electronics GmbH
Ohmstraße 55, 90513 Zirndorf
Sitz Nürnberg, AG Nürnberg HRB 31763
DE299907897 WEEE-Reg.-Nr. DE 20296389
Hongjun Zhang, Dr. Norbert Kotzbauer,
Manfred Billenstein, Xiying Mao
The same company, the same commercial register entry, the same VAT number and the same four managing directors. A German brand with 88 years of history and a Chinese brand sold at MediaMarkt and Kaufland, sharing a contact form.
The COOCAA imprint adds one line the other two do not carry: the manufacturers of what is sold there are Metz Consumer Electronics GmbH and Metz Display Polska Sp. z o.o., in Nowa Wieś Wrocławska, Poland.
What Metz is today
Metz was founded on 28 November 1938 in Zirndorf, near Nuremberg, and has built televisions since 1955. Its own timeline titles the 2010s «Schwere Zeiten und Neuanfang», hard times and a fresh start, and jumps from 2010 straight to 2015. Neither the word insolvency nor the year 2014 appears on that page.
What it does say, in these words: «Anfang 2015 fand der Metz TV-Bereich beim Elektronik-Riesen Skyworth eine neue Heimat». In early 2015 the Metz television division found a new home at Skyworth. Three years later, in 2018, METZ blue was born, the second brand, the one for the big chains.
So there are two different Metz ranges today, and they should not be mixed up:
- Metz Classic (
metz-ce.de): Primus, Lunis, Aurus, Taris, Cubus. Built in Germany, sold only through specialist dealers, and running Metz's own software, not Android. The CUBUS compact R press release says it outright: «die hauseigene Metz TV-Software». No ADB here, and no packages to disable. - METZ blue (
metzblue.com): MOD9500, MNE9000, MUD7000, MQE8000 and the rest. This is the Google TV range.
COOCAA writes it on its own site
The «about us» page on coocaa.eu does not hide it. It says «coocaa is a
registered trademark of the market-leading TV manufacturer SKYWORTH», and
then the sentence that ties the two brands together:
The SKYWORTH Group also includes the German TV brand Metz, managed by the traditional manufacturer Metz Consumer Electronics GmbH. The company is the official distributor of the TV brand coocaa for the entire European market.
The Chinese brand saying that Metz is also part of the group and is the one
distributing COOCAA in Europe. On Skyworth's Chinese site, the group
company menu links both www.coocaa.com and metz.skyworth.com. The
global English site mentions neither.
What the European register says
This is where you see who builds them. In EPREL, the European Union's energy labelling register, every record carries the legal name of whoever filed it and in what capacity.
The API returns 368 records under the METZ brand and 70 under COOCAA, but pagination is broken: whatever offset you ask for, it returns the same block of 25. What follows is 25 of each, not the total, and nothing is extrapolated.
Across those 50 records, the registrant is always one of two companies,
and both declare registrantNature: MANUFACTURER:
METZ 17 Metz Display Polska Sp. z o.o. (PL)
8 Metz Consumer Electronics GmbH (DE)
COOCAA 10 Metz Consumer Electronics GmbH, MANUFACTURER
7 Metz Consumer Electronics GmbH, IMPORTER
6 Metz Display Polska Sp. z o.o., MANUFACTURER
2 EUREP GmbH, AUTHORISED_REPRESENTATIVE
The six COOCAA records filed by the Polish company also fill in the
trademarkOwner field, and what it reads is «Skyworth Group», with
status VERIFIED. None of the 25 METZ records fills it in.
In other words: the Chinese-branded set is registered with the European Commission as built by a German company and its Polish plant, with the trademark recorded as Skyworth's.
The eight years, and what they are worth
The minAvailabilitySoftwareUpdatesYears field reads 8 on 19 of the 25
METZ records and on 23 of the 25 COOCAA ones. That is a high figure, and
neither website publishes it: it only exists in the register.
Before getting excited: the 32CNTF2NZ, which the COOCAA catalogue lists
under the heading «Non Smart TV», also declares eight years of software
updates. A television with no operating system promising eight years of
patches. The field gets filled in, not audited.
There is a second warning of the same kind. The MQE8000 sales page talks
about «the lightning-fast 144 Hz panel». In EPREL, the frequencyRate of
the 55MQE8000Z and the 65MQE8000Z is 100.
Which system each one runs, the only thing that decides whether ADB exists
The practical point, and on these two brands it changes from one model to the next. Counting the live pages on each site:
- METZ blue: ten models declare «Operation system: Google TV™» (MOD9500, MNE9000, MUD8500, MUD7000, MQE8500, MQE8000, MQE7600, MTD8500, MTD7000 and MTE6000), two declare «Roku TV™» (MRD6000 and MTD6000), and the MTE2000 declares, in that same field, «no».
- COOCAA: five on Google TV (CGNH70, CGQH40, CGQG40Z, CGPF70Z, CGPF40Z), five on Roku TV (CRUG50Z, CRTG30Z, R5G, R5GN, R3GY), one on TiVo OS (CTQH38) and one with no system (CNTF2NZ).
On Roku TV and TiVo OS there is no ADB, no Play Store and no packages to disable. On COOCAA that is seven models out of twelve.
And inside the Android half there is another fork. The METZ blue technology
page says «METZ blue Android TV™ / Google TV™ (dependent upon model)». The
launcher is not the same: Android TV uses
com.google.android.leanbacklauncher and Google TV uses
com.google.android.tvlauncher.
What the directory confirms, and what it does not
In the Google Play certified device list this site keeps (2,437 rows, 2,228
televisions and 209 players), Metz does not appear as a brand on a single
row, and COOCAA appears on exactly one, which is a player at that
(ATBOX001 THE ULTRA, platform YDA, shared with Mecool, Next, QVWI,
Skyworth, Strong and Thomson).
The only row in the whole file containing the string «METZ» is filed by a different brand:
Skyworth,"METZ 2K TV","METZ 2K TV",shinagawa,tv
Skyworth registering a Metz television under its own name. And the
shinagawa platform is shared by eighteen brands, among them Sharp,
Grundig, Beko, Arçelik, Tesla and Aiwa.
The practical part
If they share a platform, a COOCAA package list works for the METZ blue built on the same base, and the other way around. What matters is not the badge on the front:
adb shell getprop ro.product.device
Whatever comes out is what you look up in the directory. And first of all, check the system under Settings → System → About: if it says Roku or TiVo, stop there.
On a METZ blue or a COOCAA running Google TV, the list is the usual one.
Out go the streaming apps you do not use and the free content channels on
the home screen. Carefully, the recommendation engine
(com.google.android.tvrecommendations), which clears the home screen but
also empties the «continue watching» row. Leave alone
com.google.android.gms, the launcher until you have another one working,
and anything starting with com.android. you cannot identify.
Neither site publishes RAM or storage on any page, so you find that out
yourself with df -h /data and cat /proc/meminfo | head -1.
Where this fits
At one end, the brands with no factory, which supply the name and nothing else. At the other, whoever signs with their own. Skyworth does the middle thing: it really builds them, with a plant in Poland and service in Zirndorf, and sells under two names that sound German or sound like nothing. The other half of the same house, the standalone boxes, is in Mecool, Skyworth and RockTek.
One closing note that speaks for itself: metztv.de has no DNS record at
all, and coocaa.com, the domain Skyworth's own menu links to, serves a
certificate that expired on 28 April 2024 and ends up redirecting to
coocaa.eu. Skyworth's Chinese brand in Europe lives on a German server.
If you own one
What we need from these sets is what nobody publishes: the output of
adb shell getprop ro.product.device, that of df -h /data, and the exact
commercial model. That confirms which METZ blue and which COOCAA are the
same set. The specific METZ blue Google TV range is broken down in
Metz with Google TV.