Paradox-SJ said:I realize there is a lot of prep work to bring a DMA online and some DMA's are more advanced than others. (hint hint) So there must be other political reasons (ie business decisions) why they made the choices they made.
I can see them baseing it off the quality of a DMA's OTA availability and its really really good here JUST like in LA who is up and running. (One of our stations have already shut down their analog tranmission and is digi only)So that idea can hold some water but not the whole story.
I'm still waiting to hear your take about the "volumes it speaks" but a couple of factors might be:
I'm not defending Dish but as for the order in which DMAs get HD LiLs launched first, Dish has to negoiate with the individule affiliates in each prospective DMA. Some affiliates perceive their respective value as much higher than it will ever be, so negoiations can be tough in some areas.
Also, Dish doesn't fart unless there's $$ in it for them, so they may not think it's worth it to compete against a widespread OTA signal - especially since we now know Dish doesn't intend to provide as high a quality signal as many OTA stations are providing.
Some rinky-dink affiliates STILL don't / can't transmit digital yet and probably won't be for a while; or if they do, it's low power and doesn't reach much of their DMA.
This of course doesn't go over big with their respective mother networks (whom they also have to negoiate with), so if they can at least have their studio equpment set up (which is in some cases even subsidized by the national network) to produce a digital signal and can get a fiber feed to the cable companies and an uplink to satellite, this gets them in the game quicker and cheaper than they'd normally be. In these areas Dish wouldn't be competing with OTA digital, so they'd be more likely to sell their LiL packages and even attract new customers to satellite.