I'd be happy to pay them in full for a 2-year agreement if they gave me a significant discount for doing so. That would give them a nice influx of cash.
Beyond that, I think people are sometimes overlooking one of the biggest advantages in a DirecTV/Dish merger. Sure, years down the road you can get everyone on one set of equipment and 86 half the satellites. But in the near term the big advantage is leverage in retransmission negotiations. A combined Dish/DirecTV would be the biggest MSO at ~20 million subscribers, 4 million more than Comcast if the numbers I found on Wikipedia are to be believed. That means the combined company is in a much stronger position every time a contract comes up.