Playing devil's advocate, is it possible that many people only watch the handful of original series on AMC and never watch anything else on the channel? That could explain the channel being overall among the least watched even if it was one of the highest watched for an hour once a week part of the year. Also, not being in AT120 (And thus not being available to a lot of folks to begin with) probably effects it's viewership figures.
Anyhow, obviously, regardless of the technicalities, the true reason this dispute is happening is that Dish doesn't want to pay what AMC is asking for money wise. Of course enough people watch Mad Men that Dish wouldn't be dropping the channel just to free up satellite room or something.
Losing AMC doesn't affect me. I never watch it. I get my Mad Men from Netflix later. But I feel your pain here. And it does play into a larger issue of Dish dropping channels to increase it's profit margins while leaving customers (Often under contract) without their favorite stations. Maybe some folks who don't like sports won't be so quick to dismiss Dish's next dispute with a sports network after this AMC thing.
Anyhow, I could maybe deal with a television provider that was aggressive on channel re-negotiations and sometimes lost stuff (As long as it wasn't in my core 6-7 channels) if they were significantly cheaper than everyone else and passing all those savings on to consumers. I don't see much of that happening, though- Dish seems in a rough sense on par price wise with the other guys once the promotional offers expire- maybe a
tad cheaper, but that can be offset if you're not getting a bundling discount on your cable Internet because you don't have cable television.
Now, if Dish started cutting the rates of all it's packages each year as it negotiated better deals with the channels it was carrying, and maybe had to drop a few here or there, that might turn them into the guys wearing the white hats. But we all know their rates and fees just keep going up, which means they're arguing with stations over who gets more profit, the stations or Dish, while customers go without their favorite channels. I don't see why anyone would be on Dish's side, or the channels side, for that matter. As a customer, my position is, just provide me my favorite stations and favorite teams for cheap. I'm not rooting for Dish to win negotiations as if they were my favorite sports team- if a channel I watch goes dark and I still have to pay the same Dish bill with no price drop, I'm blaming Dish. Don't really care about AMC, just a general feeling I have.
..Thats really funny dishonline could be put into the same context
