ok, either you're missing my point, or i'm missing yours. re: the corporate board, what actual use does a wireless audio player have? you say "overkill for their purposes" but i haven't figured out what their purpose is at all.
Let me try and give a couple of examples from my experiences.
A company that I am currently on the Board of Advisors for has monthly meetings for the Board of Advisors as well as separate meetings for the Board of Directors. Two separate boards. (NOTE: This company was the one that actually turned me on to the squeezebox). At our last meeting we all sat and listened to the CEO talking about the company growth and so on. We then turned our focus to what analysts were saying about the company.
Turn on the squeezebox. Roughly around 20 analyst feeds were being broadcast from the web to an office where one of this companies tech workers was maintaining the feed for us. Due to the the discussion in the board room he was not allowed in that meeting or board room. The tech knew which part and how much of each feed to broadcast before switching feeds. This was arrainged ahead of time so that we in the room only heard what we needed to and not what we didn't. We were quickly able to move from feed to feed without some tech or other person being in the room (he was in another room)
In that example we (board) needed to hear audio as part of a sensitive as well as confidential meeting. The squeezebox allowed us to have the meeting in private. The tech did listen to the feed was was fine as long as he was not listening to our conversation.
Another example would be a situation where different members of a board were in different offices for a meeting. The audio feed is broadcast to those members at their individual convenience in their own offices instead of working everyone's schedule to all be in the same room. This also helps with certain DRM issues that some companies are working with now. Let's say an analyst files a report and DRM's it so that only specific people can listen to it. Well a company has one person with a licence to listen . By broadcasting it over the squeezebox all of the people who need to hear it can without having to be in the one person's office.
Again FLAC isn't a thought. But being able to have private meetings with a room full of non-techies present but still helping is very valuable.
The perception is that the squeezebox can do this better than anything with the name 'tunes" in it. The reality is that the AirPort probably could have very well done the same thing. In the first example though we only saw the squeezebox on the credenza and not a computer on the table.