+1 on the Kickstarter. If you price the liability insurance and find you need $30K for DTCP-IP licensing and liability insurance for one year, hopefully you can get enough funds to make it happen. That’s long enough to see if it is a viable product beyond those 300 people who have expressed interest (I am also interested, but haven’t signed that list, so there may be others like me)
Once the solution exists, if SiliconDust was to link to it on their site, some web sites writing articles about a way to reduce what you pay the cable company etc., you may have more than enough customers to make it viable. Maybe wouldn’t even have to do a monthly fee, just an in-app upgrade to add DRM support.
One other angle to consider are SiliconDust’s commercial customers. They are buying much more expensive hardware, but that hardware allows unlimited multicast streaming (i.e a single tuner could be streamed to 100 TVs if they were all watching the same thing) That is a lot of potential sales down the road if Channels had a polished commercial grade solution.