EA space does not help. They need space on BOTH arcs to add national HD.
There's nothing to stop Dish from taking the Eastern Arc and loading it up with CONUS RSNs -- well, nothing except Dish internal policy. There could still be some value in being able to compete with D* on HD RSN coverage for half the country.
So you lose the 5%. Big whoop. And why are the other 95% subs "no matter what"? We can vote with our wallets just as easily. You'll lose more than the 5% if they don't keep up with national channels.
The folks who were going to leave over HD probably left a couple years ago when D* was dominating in channel delivery and Dish was still lacking popular channels like SciFi and USA. It's to the point now where all 1st, 2nd, and most of the 3rd tier HD is available on Dish -- the only things to be added are 3rd / 4th tier networks that are still emerging with HD content. Dish has more national HD than D*, and I believe is currently only second to Verizon FiOS who obviously has a much smaller service footprint.
At least 60-75% of Dish's customer base is still SD-only, so we're already talking about a minority group of subscribers either way. Not that it's an excuse to ignore innovation, we don't need more General Motors type failures.
Ask yourself this: Which would Dish rather have, 5 $60/month subs, or 1 $300/month sub? The former, of course. Why? It's of course better to have more subs. One leaves, you're not out a ton of revenue.
Conversely, for every $300/mo sub that leaves you need to gain five $60/mo subscribers to maintain the same revenue. Operational costs are somewhat constant regardless of the number of subs; it costs the same amount of money to keep a satellite in place with content uplinked whether there are 1 or 1,000,000 subscribers pointed at it. Your programming, support, and end-user equipment fees are the variables that change with subscriber count.
Revenue generation absolutely factors into how frequency space is used -- if it didn't they would cut back from 15 HD PPV channels and use some of that capacity for more national HD channels.
And sports pack COST over the top money to buy, but that is not evidence they are huge moneymakers for providers. Again, if Dish made so much money with EI, why drop it?
Retailers like Best Buy need to purchase millions of dollars worth of TVs to sell them in their stores, the key is to make money on the transaction. As with most things in business, you need to spend money to make money.
As has been discussed numerous times, the cost of MLB:EI went up more than 300% in 2007 as a result of D*'s bid to get the package as an exclusive. InDemand was able to raise the funds because they negotiate on behalf of cable companies with 40 million combined subscribers, so they have the numbers to still be profitable with the package. Dish with 14 million subs and declining wasn't in the same position to make the same deal, especially when they were already struggling to get MLB:EI subscribers due to a lack of agreement with popular channels for that package like YES.
The qualifying requirements for locking up NHL Center Ice, for instance, are pretty minimal because the league struggles for ratings in the southern 2/3rds of the US. The payback on Center Ice is pretty big though; every CI sub is likely to be a GoldHD sub because of the agreement the NHL has with Versus, and they are kicking in $159/season on top of their base package. I bet it takes a few Bronze & Silver subs to make up for the lost margins when a single CI subscriber leaves.
