As a commercial dealer this makes some sense...
Commercial programming is broken down into 2 categories....
Public and Private
Private programming is for your auto repair centers, doctors offices and private offices, generally anywhere food and drinks are not served.
Public programming is for your Sports bars, resturants, coffee shops, or anywhere food and drinks are served.
The problem is that eventhough both public and private accounts are considered commercial, there is a big difference in the rates when it comes to ESPN, where as in some cases a place is paying $50 per month more in a public setting just because it includes ESPN.
The issue here is that not all places keep ESPN on all the time.
Sports bar for example, generally has ESPN on all the time and will likely get the HDTV feed. Take a coffee shop for example, they may want ESPN, but will generaly keep their televisions tuned to CNN or some type of news channel.
All this is doing is lowering the price point of the packages to make them more attractive to types of businesses that want ESPN to be available, but don't necessarly watch it every day.
The sports bars will all get the HD feed of ESPN. Any sports bar you walk into today that doesn't have HD, the owner is just too cheap to spend the money to properly upgrade, and its likely the system has been installed for several years where HD was not as important as it is today.
The way I see it, this package is specifically for smaller businesses like coffee shops, that are more price sensitive than the larger public establishments where ESPN is not on all the time.
The only other thing that comes to mind, is that It is football season and every year Dish tries to come up with something to try to sign up public accounts and take away business from Directv. I remember a few years ago Dish sent me a ton of promotional matterials to give to any new potential sports bar signing up for service. It was all football themed and it was promoting the NFL red zone channel. It looked very simmilar to the stuff that Directv sends to their sports bar customers promoting the Sunday Ticket, and I would say almost made it look like Dish carried the Sunday Ticket.