I don't understand why so many people jump to the conclusion that Dish must be the "bad guy" here. Just because your local station SAYS their requests are reasonable doesn't mean they ARE reasonable. They may be reasonable to THEM, but they're trying to make money just like Dish is.
How about this..... how about all local stations allow dish to carry their programming for FREE!
I don't consisder Dish the bad guy in this (and note this is happening to other cable companies and even DirecTV, but its not widely in the news.)
Figure it this way...
Dish charges $5.99 a month. Here in Connecticut they carry 9 SD Local channels plus 4 HD local channels.
Thats about 66 cents a channel that Dish makes on each channel.
Some of these channels want up to 60 cents a month for Dish to carry their signal.
Now figure out the costs of getting the local channels signal and backhauling it via fiber lines (and then how much more it costs for the HD version which I have not even factored into the price)
Ok so now we have got the stations from the local station to Dish Networks uplink center. Now we need to process the signal and encode the signal and properly insert it so that it broadcasts on the correct transponder, that all costs money.
Next we need to beam this signal out from a huge dish to a satellite 22,500 miles in the sky. It takes a lot of electricity to do this.
BTW that satellite cost Dish Network a few hundred million dollars.
From that 6 cents how much profit did Dish make? The answer is NONE they sell locals at a loss because people want their locals. If Dish removed all the locals and used all the transponders used by locals for national television signals they could earn many many millions of dollars showing national programming. But instead they go out and rebroadcast free signals that many viewers who live in the stations area can't pick up.
Satellite is doing the stations a favor by carrying their signal.
Without having their signals on satellite the stations have much less viewers which in turn means lower ads earnings.
These TV stations want to get paid plus have all the extra eyeballs from satellite watching and then they make more money twice.
It really isn't fair, and if you look around its not only Dish Network that having this problem, its happening to cable companies and even DirecTV.
The television companies don't care how much you pay for your service, they just want you to pay. They want you to pay for a signal you should be getting for free. There is something wrong with this picture.