determining the cost ($600-$700.00) of the innards and or production of unit. It could very well be that the internal components of the Innous does not go above $500-600. However, a HUGE part of the factor is the engineering and R&D to put all these together into a manufacturing process. Add in the manufacturing of the case itself, which can be somewhat costly. This cost is increased because these items are not massed produced like a cheap sony bluray player would be. So, the company has to custom manufacture about a 100 at a time, maybe less. You cannot send 50,000 units through an automated robot manufacturing process like Sony bluray players. You're looking at 50-200 manufactured items at a time, probably hand built.
Additionally, there is a huge cost in the development and engineering of the software, which is not anything like a standard JRiver server. This Innous product also has a custom internal network protocol that allows it to communicate directly to other Innous agent/players (the streaming port). So we are looking at probably a minimum 2-3+ years of software development labor. Part of this is wrapping the software into an automatic O/S, probably a thin version of Linux or similar. This is NOT an out-of-the-box Windows installation.
So, this is a DLNA type music server. It does require a "DLNA type renderer/player device or a USB DAC. For pricing, it is comparable to other players, such as Bryston BDP-3 or any Aurender or Auralic type device.
In comparison, I think Bryston puts together about 20-30 devices at a time during their manufacturing process at their factory.
While OCD Guy does have some good ideas if somebody wants to create a "freeware" self-built self-engineered Windows/Linux server, it requires a level of computer/software/electronics skill and it is not going to be a "black box" with the specific features of the Innous.