unless Dish can get carriage rights to many more of the Sho, HBO, Max, and Starz offerings.
There already have the rights to all of them. Premium multiplexes are sold as a package. It's up to the provider to decide how many of them to carry. The only thing up for negotiation is the fee paid per subscriber...not per channel.
It's a question of return on bandwidth investment. They could add a ton of HD premium feeds (about 25 by my count). But that would use up a ton of bandwidth. If they don't see a large number of new subscribers, it's not worth it.
The premium channels WANT to have all their feeds carried. It makes their product more attractive. There is negotiation involved, but it's mostly coming from the channels themselves. For example...totally hypothetical...look at the Cinemax for a penny deal. HBO might have offered this to DISH as an incentive to get them to add so many HBO-HD feeds. They know HBO is their real moneymaker, and having (almost) all the feeds in HD makes it more attractive to buy (Especially at $16 a month!) Of course, it could go the other way...Charlie could say "I'll carry more of your feeds if you cut your per-subscriber price 25 cents."
There are a few exceptions...Encore channels are all priced separately unless things have changed recently. And the three Showtime SD channels not carried by DISH are supposedly exclusive to digital cable. There are also some other deals made...Starz REQUIRES that at least one of the main Encore feeds be sold along with Starz. (Starz at one time was known as "Encore 8"). And Showtime theoretically only offers The Movie Channel, Flix and Sundance as a package deal with Showtime. But at one time, all those channels were sold separately. And they worked out some kind of deal to put The Movie Channel in the AT250 package. But that kind of deal is the reverse of what we're talking about.
FIOS offers 43 HD/SD premiums and another 30 SD only premiums for $30 a month. More channels, less money. It's NOT an issue of negotiating good prices for the individual channels, no matter what Charlie says. When he told people that "HBO wants too much money for HBO Zone", what he meant was "HBO won't give me a better deal, so I'm not going to carry HBO Zone until they do." It's all about return on bandwidth investment. Well, mostly.