It is fascinating to me (as an engineer) that there are no proper standards, such that any service would be supporter by a streamer, and vice versa.
Totally agree on having standards,
Standards are nice for the consumer, if those standards are any good.
Standards also have their problems.
One of them is that they tend to inhibit progress, as they're usually designed around a lowest common denominator without leaving too much wiggle room to innovate without breaking something.
And then there's the fact that each and every streaming service is using their own DRM, their own encryptions, their own data formats and APIs for library and event management…
Granted, all of the above are just implementation details, they could all be standardized.
Iff there was a will to do so.
But there isn't.
And there isn't for a reason so simple and straight forward that it's almost comical:
Unless you're running a non-profit, walled gardens work. If your goal is to make payroll each week, you have little choice but to retain control over every aspect of your customers' experience.
Tidal and Qobuz are tiny in comparison to the rest of the streaming services landscape. For small players in tech, the calculation is a little different. For them, it pays to let a third party do some of the work for them. The small guys can benefit hugely from letting someone else spend tens of thousands of hours on writing player suites and endpoint integrations, it affords them to spend more of their already limited resources on perfecting the core parts of the streaming service itself. That's why you see KKBOX, Tidal, and Qobuz integration in Roon, but none of the other services. I'm sure Roon would love to be able to support Apple Music and Spotify, as it would drive millions of new potential customers to their subscription. But the larger streamers have little to no interest in letting a third party control how the end user experiences their service. From their own point of view, allowing a third party to control the user-facing aspects of their services would turn what they perceive as a first-class service into a mere commodity.
The small ones can afford giving up this control over such a large and important aspect of their product. They might even have to just to be able to survive against the top dogs in the field. But even for the small ones there comes a day when they have to make a decision if they want to stay "open" like that, or if they should rather put up a few new walls to protect their growing brand.
Just look at Qobuz' own native player apps, for example. Just a few years ago, they were nothing short of infuriatingly useless. Not any more, though. The Qobuz player applications are getting good enough to work as well or better and more stable than Roon does. In terms of polish and feature set, they no longer need to hide from industry standards like macOS' Music app or Spotify's mobile applications.
I would not at all be surprised if and when the day comes when Qobuz decides that they can grow faster and with less friction by reducing their reliance and dependence on a third party like Roon. They're not quite there yet, of course. But they're getting there, and Qobuz Connect is a clear step into that general direction of taking back more control over their product.
Standards are nice and all. In the physical world, they can save a lot of money and make a lot of companies' and people's lives easier. But in tech, particularly in digital services, standards are problematic. Especially in the eyes of the brass and most marketing folks, standards are a mortal enemy to everything they're working towards. And that's why I'm not holding my breath for a streamer to one day support them all, or even just most of them. It's more likely for the world to figure out a way to travel and communicate faster than light than to figure out how to build and market a streamer that offers first-party support of all of the big streaming service providers. It's just not going to happen.
Endpoints, though? They're a whole different story, and might be worth looking into.
I'm sure we could rant for days on that subject but it would diminish the percentage of cat and dog photos. That would be bad.
Amen to that!
