Forgive me as I am not aware of how the subscription model used to work, but here's how I'm hoping the new subscription model will work based on others' suggestions.
One way to keep the offline activation is by allowing a consumer to purchase a subscription-based license for say, a year. This license key will activate any product version up to the date when the key expires. Any updates after this point will need a new key. This way, the old key can continue to activate the old version of the program forever, even if the key is expired, it just can't activate newer versions. Thus, we can keep the old version for however long we want if it still works for our current discs. And we only have to buy a new license to update when we need newer discs.
My family has always had a lifetime subscription, so it would be a change for us. Thus why I'm hoping the above could be the approach for the new subscription based system. I don't know if it's always been that way however. And a donation system could be beneficial for the team.
My second hope is as many others have stated previously, is the ability to download the OPD, or to have two different versions of the program, one which is OPD-dependent to save on HDD space, and one that has the OPD built-in, and thus, future-proof if the servers went down.
My third hope is this. I have heard many speak of porting AnyDVD to Linux... this could be a problem for the average consumer. I am a computer geek, however, I do not use Linux and am not really a fan. I really hate the fact that it depends on dependencies(see what I did there?
) and seems to be online-bound, requiring constant internet connection to download the dependencies, and downloading and installing programs offline is not nearly as straight-forward as it could be. I'm fine with installing programs via command-line... as long as the programs can be downloaded and installed
offline. Otherwise, I have no interest. My point is that I hope that AnyDVD will always continue to be developed for Windows, even if a version for Linux rolls around. Maybe it could be another multi-OS program.
Maybe for the average consumer the unsigned driver could be a learning curve, but I'm completely fine with it, being computer-literate. Just provide instructions for the users if need be. You could even provide a video tutorial showing how to manage it. (I keep UAC off as I find it annoying as heck. I just try to be careful, and test programs in a VM first to test for viruses. If it's clean, I then install on the host.)
I am all in and support you guys, and I sincerely hope you can return as the RedFox.
This is what the fox thinks of the government:
Image found on Google, credits go to the original photographer. (Sorry for the huge image, I couldn't find a smaller version.)