Dear Customers,

We've recently announced that mimoLive (previously BoinxTV) will be available with a time-based licensing model. We didn't come to this decision lightly.

I understand that this may be upsetting to some of you and I'm sincerely sorry about that. Personally, I wish the business model that we used back in the days would still work, but times have changed and we need to adapt.

I certainly understand the wish to benefit indefinitely from the initial purchase and being able to decide on one’s own merit when to pay for an update. But consider this: A software that is tailored entirely to a single customer’s pace and needs would cost millions instead of a couple of hundreds.

By changing our model we can afford to continue to offer our customers a great software product that they can afford.

BoinxTV 1.0 was released in 2009 and every update we shipped since then was free. That's six years of free updates. In these six years we overhauled the user interface again and again, rewrote the entire rendering engine, added numerous substantial new features and improved much more under the hood.

If you have used BoinxTV before and maybe have purchased it in 2009 for the full price, you paid less than $7 per month for it. If we could continue to provide updates free of charge, we would, but we simply cannot sustain development this way.

Our goal is to drive mimoLive forward aggressively and for it to become a mission critical tool. The list of features we want to add is endless and requires considerable resources. We've boosted our engineering team with Beni, Douglas and Thomas, our new audio, video and OS X/iOS wizards, respectively.

We want to get the latest and greatest stuff out to you, our customers, as soon as it is ready, rather than waiting until the next major release is due. We also want to be around for years to come and create a great software that you like as much as we do.

This will only work if we have a steady revenue stream. I assure you we'll do our best to demonstrate to you that your investment is worth it.

We also want to enable people to run their own TV studio that have not been able to do so before. That's why we created the "Private" license. A 3-year private license for mimoLive costs less than BoinxTV used to cost. Considering that under the old model, we would have to create a paid upgrade every 18 to 24 months, this in effect makes mimoLive more affordable. And you get new functionality and constant improvements the second they are ready instead of having to wait for a major upgrade.

There are many more arguments for this new licensing model and I acknowledge that there are also some against it. I'm sad that our decision means that some of our customer will not follow us. But I'm confident that it also means that we'll be able to better serve the customers who do.

Please feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments for this post.

Sincerely,

Oliver.