Generally you are correct with everything you say, the challenges are: - How to make it interesting for third party developers to spend time on doing something for free when there are no new Squeezebox hardware sold and Logitech no longer develops new features. - It's often hard for individual developers to get access to private API's, so as you say, all services which don't have a public API is going to be hard to get access to. - If someone want to make a plugin and charge money for it, it's going to be considered commercial and then it's a lot harder to get an agreement with the service provider as an individual developer or group of community developers, many service providers doesn't even want to start a discussion with individual developers, I know from personal experience. Public API's doesn't help much here because your usually only allowed to use them for non commercial plugins. It's also going to be harder to attract interest from streaming providers for a platform where the manufacturer (Logitech) doesn't sell new hardware.
Still, during the last year I think we have gotten more new services supported through third party developers than Logitech, smaller streaming services is usually easier to implement as plugins because they are often more interested to work with small companies or individual developers. I wouldn't worry too much about Logitech shutting down mysqueezebox.com anytime soon, if they do this they would get a lot of negative publicity plus a lot of warranty returns and I'm fairly sure that's something they like to avoid. They are likely going to ensure that the big streaming services keep working while support for smaller less used services might be shutdown when something is changed on the service provider side that causes problems. The situation might be different in 1-2 years if some other company decides to try to take a part of this market segment, because then many Squeezebox users is likely going to move to the new solution which looks more promising on longer terms and then it might be safe for Logitech to shutdown mysqueezebox.com without getting too much negative publicity. I think most people doesn't get too annoyed today if a $299 device stops working after 3-4 years and there is an acceptable replacement on the market, the situation is worse if it stops working during warranty period or if it costs a lot more than $299. My own feeling is that the decision to stop selling Squeezeboxes might actually be good for our long term needs, Logitech management lost the interest in the Squeezebox platform several years ago, so regarding features we really haven't gotten much from Logitech during the last 2-3 years (maybe even longer). The decision to stop selling Squeezeboxes forces third party developers to things to keep it alive instead of hoping that features will be implemented by Logitech and it also opens possibilities for new small companies to try to enter the market and provide something new without having to compete with a big company like Logitech. It's going to be exiting to see what happens during the next 6-12 months. It's kind of ironic that some people 2-3 years ago often complained that they didn't want functionality provided as third party plugins but wanted it to be implemented by Logitech, I wonder how they feel today when Logitech has abandoned them and the third party developers still are here to support the third party plugin based solutions. I guess the lesson to learn is that you can't be sure someone stays around just because they are big. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97690 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
