Who cares? Based on the last fiscal quarter, Dish Network probably makes around a billion dollars a year (Literally). Customers pay them real money every month right out of their pockets, and plenty of those customers are low income people who sacrifice to pay for television primarily so they can watch their favorite teams play. Dish is dropping RSNs and even some individual games on RSNs over pennies a month a head -- maybe a buck or two difference max. Dish can certain afford to eat into their profit margin a little bit, and paying customers who subscribe and pay good money to watch their teams deserve to see their teams.
I don't give a [can't think of a family-friendly word substitute] about a television company "drawing a line in the sand" or "not caving". What does it matter to me? Not like they pass the savings on -- they raise rates right along with the other television companies that *do* carry the games. If they were operating on razor-thin profit margins and cutting or holding the line on fees to customers, then I might agree with them for holding the line, or at least understand it, but as things stand, I'm against it. It doesn't benefit the consumer the way they operate.
The real kicker is that Dish gets you on a contract that you can't break and then eliminates the reason you're paying for television at all. You have to sacrifice each month to pay a bill for a service that doesn't give you what they advertise (your local teams' games) that maybe you can barely afford in the first place. Congratulations, now you're sacrificing just to give money to a rich guy who can't get along with other rich people and has stupid petty feuds over miserly small amounts of money (Relative to the total amounts of money they're dealing) without getting a service you want or value in return.
This hasn't effected me yet, but it's affected so many markets that I'm kind of worried about being on the hook for my contract for so long. It may only be a matter of time before I have to deal with this stuff first hand. When they call asking me to extend my commitment for something, I'm very likely to cite exactly these sorts of situations and say no. I don't want to worry month to month whether I can watch my teams or not and know that I'll still have to pay the bill even if I can't. They don't even, as far as I know, publicly disclose how long their contracts with RSNs extend for -- so I can't even, say, check my local RSN's contracts and know that I'm "safe" for "x" amount of time. It's total guesswork. They could disappear tomorrow for all I know.
Again, if you want to cut the profit margins and cut the fees for consumers and play hardball so we can all pay a regular non-promotional price of $30 or $40 for AT200 or something, I'll probably support you in these feuds. If your price is $60 a month after a promotion expires, with no HD (They refused to offer me the promotion they advertised and stuck me with SD based on a credit check), well, that's about the same as cable, and cable doesn't play these games nearly as often with RSNs. I don't see any reason at this point why I wouldn't go back and snare cable's promotional rate when my Dish contract expires. If I can't afford cable again after that, I can always call back the satellite company and see if they'll offer me another promotional rate. If Dish wants we as customers to show loyalty, they need to show us loyalty back -- don't advertise things and not deliver, whether it be promotions that exclude certain classes of customers, or advertising that you'll have games and then not having them, and don't raise prices to up your profit margin while cutting back channels and saying "Too bad, you're on contract, we'll charge you whatever we want and eliminate any channels we want at any time". These corporations are out of control.
