I'd do all of those things, except, perhaps the Linux one. The poll is actually difficult to respond to because the questions are formed in such a way as to have multiple elements. For example, one of the items reads "make a High Definition ReplayTV priority, with a goal to ship by the holiday season." How do you vote if you think that HD RTV should be developed as soon as it can be, but don't want it rushed out by any particular date but would prefer that DNNA take their time and do it right?
As to the discussion about subscription fees, one has to look and compare the business model of TiVo to any potential RTV business model. TiVo gets a small license fee on the TiVo software for every unit sold, and makes most of its money on subscription fees. So long as the units work with the software, TiVo doesn't really care about the price of the units, which is up to the various manufacturers/licensees. This model has never changed. Replay Networks had a much more tortured course of conduct. They initially started out selling the hardware directly with the software subscription bundled in. When that didn't work, they tried OEMing with Panasonic and selling to retail. That worked better, but had a flaw, which was that they didn't get full value for the bundled subscription. Then they announced that they would stop making hardware and only sell software licenses and service subscriptions, but that never panned out and didn't happen. Then came the sale to SonicBlue, who took things in an entirely different direction: the high-end. The idea was to make a really feature rich unit that could be sold at very high margins, the idea being that if the margins were high enough you could make a lot more profit selling fewer units than you could by selling many units at lower margins. That was, from what I understand, a very successful strategy, at least in the short term. The next step was to capitalize on the success of the 4xxx units by going back to retail. That produced the 45xx units where the software subscription was unbundled which was necessary to undo the Showstopper error and let SB receive the full value of the subscription instead of the wholesale value. This too was a smart move. If SB hadn't gone bankrupt, one would have expected the next step to be moving to TiVo's model and just licensing the software to all comers (assuming that there are comers) and selling service subscriptions.
If I were DNNA, I would take a multi-pronged approach: (1) I would continue to market to the Circuit City/BestBuy market with a Rio branded product. This would be called something like the RioTv or TV RioT. This item would not have music storage, but would have a companion piece that did do music storage, had similar cosmetics and name, would be much cheaper than Rio Central and could be linked up to the TV RioT to provide music and TV within an integrated interface. These units would require software subscription. I don't think that I'd market units that could hold more than 80 GB to this market. I'm undecided as to whether these units would have networking capability. (2) I would license the software to other manufacturers, who could build and sell units with whatever cosmetics and at whatever price they think they can make money from. These units would also require software subscription and would lack the ability to link to the Rio audio servers, which would be an exclusive feature of the TV RioT. One way I would try to expand this market would be to seek to get the technology built into TV sets and cable STBs in addition to stand-alone DVRs. (3) I would produce high-end units, probably branded as Marantz, that could do HD, have huge storage capacity, could act as client receivers to separate audio servers, could have small client units that would allow streaming to other TVs (though these clients might not themselves record), and would have all the sort of bells and whistles that one might expect from a really high-end product. I would market this as a system and stress its interconnectedness with other units, i.e., audio servers, TV clients and other DVRs both within and without one's home. These units would be priced with high margins and come with the service bundled in.
