Thanks exactly right. And that's exactly why us so called "cheap asses" are pissed. We're not exactly cheap asses. Especially seeing as how be bought the equipment. We could call all of the people leasing their equipment "cheap asses", but we're not that immature. In fact, I think it's great there is an option to lease or buy.
The problem arrises when we buy our equipment so that we don't have to subscribe to SD that we won't watch. Now that the new HD channels are being packaged with the SD crap that we won't watch, we have a right to be pissed.
We're not asking for something for nothing. We paid a lot of money to upgrade our equipment (for mpeg-4) and pay a lot more money for the new HD-pack (we gained ESPN2 - woopie!). It was supposed to be a safe assumption that we would receive the new HD channels (even if they were SD duplicates). After all, we were getting ESPN-HD and ESPN2-HD without having to have ESPN-SD. And we were getting DiscoveryHDTheater without having to have the Discovery Channel-SD.
Fact is, there just aren't enough HD channels to start breaking it up into different packages yet. Why even have the HD-Only pack if you're going to exclude certain HD channels? If there were 100 HD channels, I could understand breaking them into packages (just like the current SD situation). But I'm not going to upgrade to a metal package (for $10 or $20 more per tier) for one or two additional HD channels.
I knew there were going to be some issues for E* to address with this whole conversion to HD. It would be really difficult for them to offer certain HD channels now and then take them away when there are enough channels to break them into seperate tiers. But they are handling it the wrong way in the current state of HD. Add to that, the fact that nobody should have to pay for it since it's not true HD anyway...that's a whole other topic.