I certainly can't speak for Duane. But, I suspect the answer to your question is that it is not nearly as easy as it might look.

Some of the decisions I think would need to be made include:
- Do only people who pay for a subscription get the service?
- Do people get a "free trial" to decide if they like what they see before committing?
- Assuming non-payers get cutoff, how do you manage a database of 42,000 devices to assure that someone who pays gets the service and someone who does not gets no service?
- If a mistake is made, and I pay for my service but it does not get activated, who do I call or write to get that researched and fixed?
- If Blue Octy relies on a donation model, how do you bug people enough to generate the revenue needed? Will there be a pledge drive widget that shows up on my Chumby if I am a non-payer, but that gets removed quickly once I pay?
- How many people will be involved in the administrative aspects? Right now, I think it is just Duane. Someday, even he might like to take a vacation. What happens then?
- Assuming we have a mandatory payment system, what is the "right" price that generates enough revenue to keep the server running, plus generates enough of a profit to keep Duane and any other staff members interested, but still assures that Chumby owners don't say "no thanks" in high enough numbers that the revenue needed is not realized? Picking a price is crucial, since raising prices later could be very difficult. Just ask JC Penney about that.
- Do the subscriptions get sold by the device or by the household? Are they monthly, annual, or lifetime?
- If the Chumby service goes down, how does Duane protect his reputation. Over the past couple of years, there have been several server outages, most recently, I think, because of a problem at Amazon Web Services. Since the cost of the service up to now has been $0 per year, there was not much room to complain, even if some people did. But if the cost is higher than that, I assume at least some people will have a different expectation for the quality of service.

In other words, there are lots of small and large decisions that need to be made before turning on the subscription faucet. From what I have seen of Duane's conscientiousness over the last few years, he clearly is thinking about all of these issues and many more before taking that step.

For now, I am delighted that he has shown a commitment to keeping Chumbys alive, even in a somewhat diminished state. I am quite sure that over the next few months, he will roll out improvements as well as ways for those of us using our Chumbys to pay for the services required to support those improvements.

Wa that the old Zap2It Labs service you were using?  I was involved in just that in early 2000's.  Busy writing XML listing files for Tivos in Canada 

Well to some degree, as the subscriptions dwindle, so will server load (so the server can be migrated to lesser/cheaper hardware)...

There's a distinction to be made between short and long term viability of the Chumby ecosystem. In the short term, getting the existing devices working again in order to bring in some sort of subscription revenue is an obvious priority. But the existing devices won't last forever, and over time many will get "retired" even if they're still physically working, so for the long term viability of the system it will be necessary to get more "devices" in future.

Now a "device" doesn't necessarily have to be hardware - just look at the old Virtual Chumby, for example. I think all the right noises are being made about potentially implementing an HTML5 widget viewer. If this were to be built in a way that makes it easy to port as a stand-alone application (i.e. a nice separation of the Chumby parts from the platform parts), then future "devices" could be a desktop widget for Windows or Linux, a dashboard widget for OSX, a homepage widget on Android...

Now imagine this future in which we've got a fairly platform agnostic widget viewer. Do you want a new physical Chumby device? The community could port the viewer to a low-cost computing platform (e.g. the Raspberry Pi), and source some suitable touchscreens and speakers. Now the physical form of your Chumby is up to you. Do you want something like the Chumby One - hard and plastic - then download one of the 3D models that the community will (hopefully) produce and get it made on your home 3D printer, or via a company like Shapeways. Want something more squishable? A different 3D model would give you a basic framework to hold the hardware in place, but you can build your own bean-bag around it. Of course if Blue Octy wanted to start selling hardware kits of the screen, printer and support frame - simply add your own Raspberry Pi - then that might also be an option.

There are a million Raspberry Pis out there. As a low-cost platform it's captured people's imaginations. Combine it with a touch screen, a widget viewer, and an easy way to make Chumby widgets and I could see potential for a lot more users in future.

Okay, this post is perhaps more pertinent to the "Future" thread, but there seems to be a bit of crossover between them. The point really is that the short term priority should be on getting things back up and running, under a subscription service, before too many users give up on the Chumby system entirely. Without keeping the existing users, there will be little incentive for developers to create widgets for any future "device".