To be honest, I don't know if you can have two home media DVRs set up that way. You can certainly have multiple DVRs, and you can certainly have one home media DVR, and a stand-alone DVR, but I don't think you can have multiple home media DVRs, although you may want to call them to find out for sure.
As for the cost, yeah, it CAN be more, depending on your setup. For me it was a net savings over DirecTV, but if you have multiple DVRs, FiOS can be more expensive. As for the stand-alone boxes, yes, they do charge for them. The SD boxes are $6/month, and the HD boxes are $10/month, although I understand that they're going to offer the HD boxes for the same price as the SD boxes to new customers as well.
One other thing to consider - the triple play price. This may have changed very recently (this was in effect when I re-upped my triple play just a couple months ago, but I doubt it), and it does vary by state, but when I renewed my triple play here in PA, I had 3 different choices:
- triple play with 10/2 internet service for 1 year: $105/month.
- triple play with 10/2 internet for 2 years: $110/month.
- triple play with 20/2 internet for 2 years: $115/month
Sounds like you're going for the last one.
One last point, the home media dvr can feed out to 6 additional TVs, so you can opt for just the one DVR, and have set top boxes on the rest of the TVs. Right now they don't feed out HD recordings, and right now the HD STBs can't access the recordings off the DVR, but that's coming very soon. They're in the process of rolling out their latest s/w update - all markets will have it by the end of September. As part of that update, HD STBs will be able to access recordings from the home media DVR, and you'll be able to feed out HD recordings to your HD STBs.
I believe you can access recordings from three separate TVs at the same time too (including the TV with the DVR).
One nit with all this - you can't manage recordings from those other TVs. You can play back recordings, but you can't add or delete recordings from them - although the multi-room feed does work surprisingly well (I have the home media dvr). There are other nits - there's a latency when using DVR functionality from one of the other TVs. So, if I'm watching a recording on a TV with the standard STB on it, and I hit, say, FFWD, it takes a few seconds to respond. The reason is that the multi-room feeds go through your computer router.
There is one final option that you can use - tivo. If you don't mind shelling out the money for the boxes, and paying the rate to tivo, you can have dvr to dvr feeds with tivo. Although doing so will mean that you can't access video on demand from those tvs.