OK. How about this then?
Executive Summary and Bold Statement
JRiver Media Center 30 is the best solution available for organizing and playing digital media. Period. If you own any previous version, you can upgrade at a discount now. If you don't, well, just download it and try it and judge for yourself.
Long Winded Story With More Bold Statements. Feel Free to Re-post.
How did a little company you never heard of become a leader in the digital media space?
Little old JRiver isn't a Silicon Valley startup fueled with VC afterburner cash. It's not a game changer, paradigm shape shifter flashy company. Its offices have been poorly lit, dense rabbit warrens with poor heat and no AC, and hollow core doors on top of old file cabinets for desks. The company was more than 30 years old when it bought its first (used) Aeron chair. The boss wanted one.
By the way, if you're shaking your head, try a Google search for audiophile software or HTPC software. or DLNA Server JRiver will be there, on the first page.
So how did we acquire a leadership position in an important part of the digital galaxy? The old fashioned way. We earned it! And we did it in Minnesota, the American Arctic, with programmers who love Winter and who know what oofdah means, and that a sled isn't a kid's toy. Hot dish for dinner?
Seven guys, mostly from near the Canadian border, guys who can paddle upstream for years, even decades if that's what it takes, and do it in duct tape wrapped chairs.
The secret ingredient is an enthusiastic band of customers who helped them find their way through a morass of standards, devices, protocols, codecs, and just plain alphabet soup stew. Their customers knew what they wanted, knew how to build it and JRiver listened and learned. And broke things. And fixed them. And kept paddling for 25 years, in spite of being frequently excluded from major companies' walled gardens. LIke mice dancing with elephants, JRiver had to watch their step and get by with crumbs.
Day after day, the JGuys walked to work uphill both ways with the snow flying sideways. Real men, not quiche eaters.
These guys never doubted that they were doing something important, even noble. Building a digital media world their customers imagined. One that would play anything, anytime, anywhere.
At the center is a single piece of software that has been worked and re-worked countless times, with hooks and extensions that allows customers the freedom to move from OS to OS, from device to device, from protocol to protocol. Supported by API's that customers or developers can use to connect with the JRiver engine.
JRiver began with TCP/IP and Ethernet in the very early days of the Internet, when modems screamed at 300 baud. They built significant parts of it before bigger companies noticed. So a digital world with hubs and spokes as far as the eye could see is a natural idea. They only had to build it. Thirty five years later, they've done it.
