You can buy a cheap legal Chinese bluray player for 50 bucks, so I don't see it as impossible for JRiver to do something similar..
Unfortunately, it isn't so simple. Licensing AACS and HDCP is very complex (and you really need a lawyer experienced in the field to even figure out what is required). But, at the root, the differences between JRiver building a software player, and some electronics manufacturer building a hardware BluRay player amount to:
1. Licensing required for AACS and HDCP is divided up into many, many different categories. So, the "device manufacturer" isn't responsible for all of the different licenses directly (including their required annual fees and per-unit costs). Essentially, they use components on the board which are, themselves, licensed by their individual manufacturer, and they don't have to directly license each individual component.
2. The structure of the licensing, and especially the required testing for certification, is designed (purposefully) to limit the number of possible vendors, and prevent "small players" from entering the market. This is primarily accomplished by annual fees and putting caps on the costs. As an example, if you have to pay, for one particular license, $25K per year plus $2 per device. But they limit the total cost to $5M total. If you sell 5K "devices" per year, it costs an order of magnitude more to cover these costs than if you sell 50 million units per year. This, of course, combines with point 1. That chip on the motherboard of that $50 BluRay player wasn't used in just that particular model, but was used on almost
all of the players on the market.
3. Pricing for required certification testing is wildly different for software players versus hardware players, and they're able to change their minds on things as they go. Keep in mind, most (if not all) of the AACS key "leaks" have come from software players, because they're impossible to secure (good luck keeping me from looking for the key in memory on my paused VM). Testing and certification on hardware players is relatively straightforward, if not still unbelievably expensive. You buy a certified test "device" which tests your hardware and spits out a result. Software testing is basically at the whim of the various licensing authorities.
It is a shell game designed with the explicit goal of preventing lots of various companies from competing, and especially for keeping small players out of the market. Because it was designed by the established industry, of course, and because it is easier to keep a few players "in line" than a mass of them all fighting with one another.
I'm not saying it is impossible, and I don't claim to be an expert on all of the costs involved. But the barriers to entry exist and are very high. Comparing to a commodity hardware player isn't a fair comparison.
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Topic: Slysoft/AnyDVD goes out of business (Read 67529 times)