Maybe you've wondered, when we've let you down, what are those guys "thinking", "doing", "smoking", etc. I want to try answer that and tell you why it's not as easy as it seems.
We've been working on media software since 1998. That's more or less the time when the Diamond Rio came out. It was considered to be the first MP3 player, so that's pretty early.
We started with Media Jukebox. We gave it away for a couple of years and then thought, "Hey, why don't we sell it?" I think that was MJ8 and we ran with it for a couple of years.
We began with Media Center in version 9, when we added video. We raised the price a little. $39.98?
14 versions later, we're at $49.98 and we sell a lot of licenses for it.
What makes this possible is the team of developers. This has changed over the years, but the current team has been the core group for a long time now. They are (in alphabetical order):
Matt Ashland, who is the primary architect of the software, though he inherited a lot of pieces from previous developers. Matt is the author of Monkey's Audio, which was neck and neck with FLAC when we hired him. It would be an APE world if he hadn't come to work at JRiver.
Brad Atima, who we found a couple years ago, and taught him to program, or at least taught him how to teach himself how. Brad has worked in a few languages and on a few projects, now is working on Engen and the Id. He's young and smart and will do great things in the future.
Bob Brose. Bob is an unusual combination of hardware guru and software guru, and this has served JRiver well for almost as long as JRiver has existed. He came to work in 1982, just after we started. He wrote a payroll in mbasic, when we did accounting software. He later wrote a terminal emulator in assembler, when we did DOS/UNIX connectivity software. He is our main server admin.
Yaobing Deng, our TV expert. He quit teaching physics to do something meaningful and has worked at JRiver since time out of mind. For about 15 years, he's worked remotely, living in Chicago. He patiently solves every problem that comes his way.
Hendrik Leppkes has been at JRiver for about five years now. We've worked with him for maybe ten years, since he was the author of the LAV filters that, along with madVR, are the basis of Red October. He has an amazing comprehension of the nuances of video, but his knowledge and problem solving extend far beyond. Hendrik works in Hamburg, Germany, and along with Yaobing, visits Minnesota every couple of years.
Gene Olson has been at JRiver a couple of different times. He did our Podcasting feature, from start to finish, about ten years ago. It's worked ever since. Now he's working on Engen, our home automation software. Gene brings a lot of experience from a lot of other companies.
John Thompson is our utility man. He can play all positions and do it well. He backs up Bob on server hardware. He's written a lot of our server software. He programs in C++ and Ruby on Rails and other languages. He is a developer's developer. He's been at JRiver since I was a young man.
Keenan Thompson, along with Brad, may be the future of JRiver. He's worked at JRiver in the summer for four or five years. He ran his own Minecraft server business when he was in 10th grade and made good money at it. At JRiver, he's worked on porting and on web apps. He's working on Radio KISS now.
