castalla wrote: > However, maybe I'm a bit of a Luddite as I really don't like all this > 'cloudy' thing > I believe people around here is afraid of the cloud because they have seen mysqueezebox.com and know what happens when it goes down.
There are two scenarios: 1. You want to listen to local music 2. You want to listen to online streaming services People understand that scenario 2 isn't possible without a reliable internet connection but they want to be able to accomplish scenario 1 without a reliable internet connection. If they loose the internet completely, most will accept that you don't get full functionality in scenario 1, but it's important that you at least are able to listen to your local music. As an example, if they can't share the local music they are listening to instantly on Facebook while the internet is down they will generally accept it. Logitech Squeezebox solved scenario 1 pretty nicely through LMS and so does Sonos (who only relies on a network mounted drive with local music). With UE Smart Radio Logitech showed how you can make a system extremely dependent on internet both for scenario 1 and 2. It's obviously a bad idea to do this, but they had to do something quick and they didn't have the time to do the necessary adjustments to their architecture, so the UE Smart Radio architecture is what we got. Now, people who have sniffed the network or looked in the server log files from LMS with network debugging enabled knows how much traffic there is continuously between the player and server when using the system. What Logitech did with mysqueezebox.com is essentially to move the server part to the cloud which means that all this network traffic have to be handled by a central server with the result that you are extremely dependent that the central server must be available for scenario 2, so you aren't just dependent on an internet connection you are also extremely dependent also on the cloud server itself. This is what you get with a slim device when you move the server part to the cloud, basically a system which is extremely dependent on a cloud server being up. As long as you can keep the cloud server up, it's not a problem, but let's just say that it's a lot easier to operate a cloud server which responds to 2 messages per minute from each device compared to one that have to respond to 200 messages per minute from each device. I'm not sure about the exact numbers here but generally a solution with slim devices requires a lot more network traffic than a solution with thick/rich devices. I'm not going to go into any details how we have solved it but let's just say that we have learned a bit from Logitech's mistakes and we don't plan to repeat them, the market looks different today than it did 10 years ago when the Squeezebox architecture was designed, due to this our system is not a clone of the current Squeezebox architecture. Regarding having cloud server at all, it's needed for two reasons: 1. People wants a modern system which easily can be updated with new features, as bluegaspode mentions this is very hard to accomplish through software installed on the local network or by updating the firmware of the devices. Firmware updates is fairly easy to handle as long as we are talking about a single hardware vendor (look at Sonos or Apple) but it's a lot bigger challenge when involving multiple hardware vendors (look at Android as an example). Having the part of the logic that changes often in the cloud helps a lot in the multiple hardware vendor scenario. Making our own hardware would also have been an easy solution to this problem, but we believe it's very hard for a single hardware vendor to fulfill all possible usage scenarios so we decided to go for the multi vendor solution instead and focus on making a software platform. 2. People want easy access to the latest online services, this includes everything from the latest social network services to streaming services. Here open source is an issue, because if you call a premium streaming provider (for example Rhapsody) and ask if you can get access to their API to be used in your open source software they are just going to hang up. If your software is closed source, the first question they are going to ask is how many customers you have, if your answer is that you think you can distribute your closed software to 5000 people who are willing to install it on a local computer, the next question they are going to ask is if you have some stats that shows that these 5000 people actually use your software. Try to answer those questions without some kind of cloud server, then realize that the minimum volumes you are going to have to show them to make them even interested to talk to you have to be significant higher than 5000 users, which also means that you have to be able reach people who aren't happy to install custom software on a computer. Independent if we like it or not, a cloud server solves many of these problems because it makes it easy to upgrade the software with new features and it makes it easy to get confirmed stats about number of users using the system which is needed in discussions with some streaming service providers. It's also important to notice that we have people in the team who have extensive experience of negotiations with streaming service providers, so these are not just guesses, it's pure facts based on previous experience. If we thought it would be possible to fulfill the user experience, satisfy hardware vendors and get necessary agreements with streaming providers with a solution purely based on server software installed on a computer, we would have done it that way, but this isn't how the market works. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98467 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
