A part of the beauty of RAAT is that the logic on the endpoint side is super simple. Even if the company is alive, they are not obligated to update the Roon Ready SDK on the devices. (When was the last time a Roon update required you to update the endpoint…).
It does not do much more than load a script from the network, which then does the complex stuff. I.e., “future updates for Auralic go through Roon for Roon ready devices” is already what’s happening by design as far as Roon Ready support is concerned, and nothing more can be expected without the manufacturer, anyway.
Support for new streaming services, file formats, DRM schemes, etc can be supported without a firmware upgrade. In fact, the only reason an upgrade should be required is to fix a low-level bug, or to access more hardware functionality. This is really important. Not all partners/hardware have easy firmware update paths that can be done at home. Our acceptance of this reality has deeply influenced RAAT’s design. Just as with Google’s Cast devices, the majority of the business logic is delivered to the device at run-time as a script. This means that we are capable of completely re-designing the audio streaming and buffering logic without updating device firmware. This is absolutely critical, since most of the bugs + evolution in a system like this relate to networking, not audio. Other than Cast, we are unaware of another system that is this flexible.