The satellite capacity for spot beams has gone way up the last few launches. Dish has to carry all the stations in HD for every market they carry in HD by 2012. Now there are a ton of spot beams that are lightly used since they are being lined up for these local stations. Some markets will pobably have too much capacity and good looking locals, others will probably be squeezed as much or more than national HD channels.

Many markets will end up with too much capacity for LiL HD, so they will be lightly compressed. If it takes 31 transponders in spot beam to give minimum coverage (about what they are using now on WA 10 on 110, 5 on 119, 16 on 129) for the large markets that have to be covered, they will have a lot of spare TPs for the smaller markets, especially in the middle of the country. The 31 TPs can be repeated over and over to give coverage, and might be needed in the NE with a lot of big markets all close to eachother. Out in a place like TX the markets are far apart and have fewer stations, meaning they probably have too much capacity.

Dish has figured out (and same with DIRECTV) that quantity, not quality is what sells. They will try to put as many channels on a transponder that they think they can get by with.