Having the history of the industry hiking prices on your side is not much a foresight, or much a hindsight.
I suspect a lot of people like Dish for the innovative technologies and programming provided in the past. They came at certain expenses. If you want to be on the cutting edge, you need to be willing to take risks, and expect to be affected by the risks.
VOOM was a good example of a cutting edge service gone bad. Alternatively and realistically, Dish can learn a lesson or two and play safe from now on, but then there will no longer be reasons for you to like it, Dish will be just like every other provider.
BTW, any price hike will not be dictated by the settlement, rather by how much the market can bear. Dish cannot price itself out of contention with its competitors.
That's correct to price themselves out of the market would kill them with the competition.That is why I see a 2 year price hike and the rest of it spread out on other areas. Like DVR FEES or any other FEES that DISH can get away with.
It was just two years ago in February that DISH created the new equipment FEE structure that went from a simple $5.00 additional receiver fee for sd and $6.00 for hd , to the assorted structure tied to their new class of receivers. So instead of $6.00 for an additional receiver like the 722k , you would now pay $17.00. For the 922 if you had two it would be $21.00 . This was done to roll all their assorted fees like the Tv 2 fee for $5.00 and the dvr fee at the time $5.98, into the bigger equipment fee. To hide the extra fees because they had the reputation of being the KING of FEES. They also had the DVR FEE per DVR receiver, that discouraged most to drop their second dvrs off their accounts or trade them in for 211ks with dvr software and external hard drives, in order to escape the extra $10.00 fee on the 722/722k/ dvrs. They hid about $3.00 of their dvr fees in the equipment fees in order to claim that they have only one dvr fee per account.
They have also recently hiked the price of different sports packs like the RED ZONE channel . Went from $7.00 last year to I think it is $9.00 or $10.00 a month now? they will spread the additional cost of this lawsuit and the additional cost of carrying these channels through out their fee structure , their ala carte packs, as well. DISH has a long history of creating fees and I am sure we will see a new standardized fee structure for DVRs. I am betting a standard $10.00 across for all dvrs. It has been almost three years since the 2010 equipment fee increase,why not increase it again?
Believe me , I see DISH will do something like this, because if they included all the costs into one price hike , it would most likely be in the $10.00 range. We have had an $8.00 increase in the past , so $10.00 wouldn't be out of range . But like you said and I agree with you , they would price themselves right out of the market. That is why they moved to the Hopper /joey system because their equipment fee shakeup didn't help them build subs. It has the opposite effect and they lost subs quarter after quarter. The Hopper has helped bring them back. So has the newer $7.00 per joey AND additional HOPPER. It has helped make them once again : competitive in the industry.
I hope that DISH will be merciful in February with their price hikes and new fees or increase on their fees, but I just don't see it. As I've said before , DISH ALWAYS makes PROFITS ,even when they lose subs quarter after quarter.