The standards side of things is true, however this can be largely solved by providing a reference implementation, given that no device manufacturer is going to implement the stack from scratch. Automated testing of firmware would also work. As for high conformance... WiFi and BT devices manage to work well enough by simply buying a tested chipset and building on that, no external testing/fees necessary.
I understand the certification if a manufacturer wants to sell a product commercially as 'Matter Certified'. For hobbyists or smaller players, pulling the reference implementation, loading it onto a cheap MCU, and calling it 'Works with Matter' would suffice.
As it stands, the latter isn't an option, because of the codesigning they've shoehorned into the spec. And for all the noise made about security, once connected to the hub the manufacturer can run whatever they like on it and send data back to their servers with very little visibility to the user.
Thread is arguably the interesting part for low power devices, and doesn't force certification. Matter is little more than a protocol spec, at the tradeoff of locked down devices and annual fees. For Matter over WiFi, I can't see any point whatsoever in using it. And for the costs of Doing Matter/Thread certification most smaller hardware startups will balk at the hundreds of thousands required to do so, and stick with WiFi/BT/Zigbee/Thread + roll their own protocol/app.
All these new standards looking to become the successor to WiFi/Zigbee IoT devices, yet every single one makes the same mistake - they think that because they find ways to force certification, take away end user control and extract licensing fees, that they’re somehow going to convince people to buy it as the next big thing.
I was cautiously optimistic when Matter/Thread was in its early days, but predictably as with most of these industry backed standards it’s turned into another pay to play walled garden. The CSA seems to be particularly bad at this.
Cant wait to see in subsequent years all the additional e-waste when manufacturers consider devices obsolete, and no one can repurpose them because of Matter spec mandating secure boot.
I figured this might be useful to some of you - more than once I've had a project that uses Protobuf without gRPC, and developing against Protobuf over HTTP services has been a bit tiresome due to lack of tooling - this seeks to solve that issue to an extent. Use a client like Postman or Insomnia to send JSON requests to an HTTP endpoint, specify the protobuf mesaage types, and let this proxy handle the rest. No more manual encoding/decoding/general unwanted friction.
Behind the scenes there is a lot more going on than just songs getting shorter. I'll focus on Spotify as it's the firm I'm most familiar with. The article briefly touches on the hook being moved to the beginning, so I'll skip that part - much the same thing is happening on streaming platforms for movies/tv shows, where analytics are used to determine the ordering and features of a piece of content to maximise engagement/minimise churn - at the expense of directorial freedom.
There are 2 other significant factors at play. The first is that not all streams are created equal. It is relatively well known that the large studios have cut deals on payouts per stream, eg. $0.0029 vs $0.002, depending on the artist's following, age of the album, etc. But, a lesser known fact is that not all streams are created equal in a number of countries. Songs played is sequence on an album, or as part of a playlist, may attract a lesser premium than individual plays, and radio broadcast format pays less still. How it works depends on the jurisdiction/contract. With this in mind, consider how you listen to songs on Spotify. You may search for songs and albums, but a large proportion of the music you hear probably comes from autoplay, where Spotify matches what it 'thinks' you might like to hear.
With the above in mind, Spotify has been acquiring podcast companies and building them into their client for several years. There is undoubtedly an audience for podcasts, but the business case is that they do not have any of the licensing legacy issues that music has, where Spotify gets to keep a bigger piece of the pie.
The point in the article - that 'songs are getting shorter, albums are getting longer, and artists are collaborating across genres' is mostly a result of artists producing to satisfy a recommendation algorithm that balances retaining listeners, whilst minimising licensing costs.
The collaborating across genres is also explainable; several years ago, Spotify bought a company called Echonest (amongst others), which was essentially a large graph database mapping songs and their musical attributes (genres), onto which a recommendation engine was built - it's worth looking up their whitepapers on matrix factorisation at scale if they still exist. The corrolary though, is that similar listening habits could be used to cross-recommend songs with a good degree of accuracy.
There are also a smattering of other considerations to take into account - a lot of the large playlists not operated by Spotify are pay to play - if you're a new artist, you can pay to feature on playlists for a given genre. There is no official channel for doing this, but the practice is widespread. These playlists make more money if they have 50 x 3 minute songs, than 30 x 5 minute songs.
I'm sure you can see where this is going - a cost/engagement optimisation engine, along with a recommendation engine where artist remuneration is more or less directly proportional to the number of people that are happy to listen to it if it is played for them.
The artist is rewarded if they produce a larger number of songs, suitably homogenised to appeal to the mass market and sound familiar to what they already listen to, and to hit as many of the genres possible to maximise inclusion in recommendations. Unless you are one of the few exceptional artists, you are going to be punished for creativity vs. playing it safe.
There's no easy fix for this, assuming it needs fixing. All media streaming platforms in the long run chase the marginal user, who by and large wants average content almost by definition.
Tweaking the remuneration model would be a good starting point, where instead of Spotify taking eg. 30% of the subscription, and paying $0.0018-0.0032 per stream depending on artist, if instead the model worked as Spotify taking 30%, and each artist payout for a user's streams was calculated as ($10 * 0.7) * (number of plays by user of artist songs / total plays in given period), one would likely see artists serving niches or esoteric music to be better remunerated, albeit at the expense of the studios managing household name artists.
I understand the certification if a manufacturer wants to sell a product commercially as 'Matter Certified'. For hobbyists or smaller players, pulling the reference implementation, loading it onto a cheap MCU, and calling it 'Works with Matter' would suffice.
As it stands, the latter isn't an option, because of the codesigning they've shoehorned into the spec. And for all the noise made about security, once connected to the hub the manufacturer can run whatever they like on it and send data back to their servers with very little visibility to the user.
Thread is arguably the interesting part for low power devices, and doesn't force certification. Matter is little more than a protocol spec, at the tradeoff of locked down devices and annual fees. For Matter over WiFi, I can't see any point whatsoever in using it. And for the costs of Doing Matter/Thread certification most smaller hardware startups will balk at the hundreds of thousands required to do so, and stick with WiFi/BT/Zigbee/Thread + roll their own protocol/app.