[jayasena]

"Blindly loyal" has nothing to do with it. There are many many reasons somebody might not want to switch to Dish: Its notoriously poor customer service. The channels it doesn't have, particular AMC. (Pac-12 fans are not the majority of television viewers in many households.) The inability to get the NFL Sunday Ticket package on Dish. It's not just some arbitrary quirk of nature that DirecTV has twice as many households as Dish and close to 100 percent of the sports-bar business.

I've been with Dish for quite some time now and I'm not sure where the poor customer service rap comes from. So far, I've had very good service from Dish (certainly better than I'm used to from my other information service providers past and present -- Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, Cingular etc.) Recent customer satisfaction studies seem to back that up even though the delta seems pretty small:

Among the larger companies, Verizon's FiOS service scored the highest, up 3% to 74. DISH Network (69), U-Verse (68) and satellite TV provider DirecTV (68) trailed Verizon.

The lack of some channels is certainly a valid criticism, especially the NFL content. Charlie E. seems to have more than his fair share of spats with various content providers but, hey, if i had to pick between AMC and the Pac-12 network, I know what i'm going with (especially since I don't really care for any of the team pro sports) :)

[jayasena]

"Blindly loyal" has nothing to do with it. There are many many reasons somebody might not want to switch to Dish: Its notoriously poor customer service. The channels it doesn't have, particular AMC. (Pac-12 fans are not the majority of television viewers in many households.) The inability to get the NFL Sunday Ticket package on Dish. It's not just some arbitrary quirk of nature that DirecTV has twice as many households as Dish and close to 100 percent of the sports-bar business.

I've been with Dish for quite some time now and I'm not sure where the poor customer service rap comes from. So far, I've had very good service from Dish (certainly better than I'm used to from my other information service providers past and present -- Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, Cingular etc.) Recent customer satisfaction studies seem to back that up even though the delta seems pretty small:

Among the larger companies, Verizon's FiOS service scored the highest, up 3% to 74. DISH Network (69), U-Verse (68) and satellite TV provider DirecTV (68) trailed Verizon.

The lack of some channels is certainly a valid criticism, especially the NFL content. Charlie E. seems to have more than his fair share of spats with various content providers but, hey, if i had to pick between AMC and the Pac-12 network, I know what i'm going with (especially since I don't really care for any of the team pro sports) :)