Why does Dish still broadcast SD channels? It is a pain to look thru the add channels list to see if I want to add a channel to my Favorite list and all I see are mostly SD channels. Who has DIsh that cannot get the HD channels. Even if your tv is not HD , can't it still receive the HD channel? They are all digital.
I still have a deactivated standard-def 512 receiver hooked up, and it still receives free preview channels. It is not hard to imagine that Dish still has actual subscribers still using these very old standard-def receivers, as long as they continue to work. Just look at how many people were inconvenienced when Dish did their last major conversion from QPSK to 8PSK. (Okay, it may not seem like a lot of people, but we did get some posts here about it. Now multiply that by all the vast majority of regular Dish subscribers who do not post here or on other sites like this, and it could be a significant number.) Yes, the HD receivers do down-convert the HD channels to SD so they can be viewed on older TV's. However, Dish would still have to upgrade all of those customers to HD receivers first. That may not be worth the investment, especially with no guarantee that those customers will continue to stick around long enough for Dish to get their money back. So, until Dish finally stops broadcasting in MPEG-2 entirely, those SD channels are likely to remain for quite a long while, at least on Western Arc.
The good news is that many (maybe even most) channels that are carried in HD on Eastern Arc are in fact HD-only, especially with a standard installation of 61.5 and 72.7 only. (There are still some SD duplicates at the 77 satellite location.) So, switching to Eastern Arc would be one way to eliminate most of those duplicate SD channels. If you need the satellite-delivered locals, and if those are only available on Western Arc for your market, then you could add a second dish (for just that one orbital slot) to your Eastern Arc installation, to have access to all of your channels. (Hopefully, those locals would be at the 129 orbital slot, which also does not have very many SD duplicates of national channels on it.)
If you are talking about channels that are only carried in SD, then the reasons for those could be contractual, or simply bandwidth-related. Even if Dish has plenty of spare bandwidth on Eastern Arc, remember that Dish still has to duplicate those channels for Western Arc. As I said before, those Western Arc SD feeds are still MPEG-2, so they can be bandwidth hogs compared to the equivalent MPEG-4 SD channels on Eastern Arc. Dish may not have the capacity on Western Arc to add a lot more national channels, especially in HD. Therefore, that also limits what they can make available on Eastern Arc, unless they want to go back to requiring a two-dish solution to provide certain channels. For certain popular channels that Dish does have enough bandwidth available to add in HD on both arcs, they may simply be waiting for the old contract to expire, before negotiating to add the HD feed.
Fortunately, lack of bandwidth may not be much of an issue for adding streaming channels. Dish has been working on adding more of those lately, and integrating them into internet-connected Hopper and Wally receivers. So, it may get to the point where the vast majority of channels (or at least the vast majority of new channels) are delivered that way, with many or most of those feeds being HD.
